RuckZuck Figures for 2019

RuckZuck had its 5 years anniversary on 2nd December 2019... Time to summarize some figures (as for 2018, 2017, 2016 and 2015 )

Summary

RuckZuck.exe was downloaded 15'629 times in 2019 from https://github.com/rzander/ruckzuck. In 2018 it was 10'926, a light grow, but these numbers depends on the number of published releases ( we had 11 Releases in 2019 ).
An interesting number is the total downloads from GitHub in 2019: 200'293 downloads !!!
It seems that RuckZuck.exe no not the most popular File, it's the RuckZuck Provider for OneGet (179'295 downloads). The OneGet Provider is part of Device Commander, a cloud based client management solution, which indicates that RuckZuck is also used in Enterprise environments... and/or someone had a download loop as the high download numbers where only in Feb/March 2019..

RuckZuck is used globaly... if you want to see the locations of current RuckZuck customers, open the Support page or RuckZuck Map ... have you found your location ?

The Repository includes 511 current Packages or 2'829 Packages, if we also count older Versions.
To evaluate product updates, there is a Mapping-Table with 65'957 Software-Items.

113'827 Software Packages where downloaded from RuckZuck. The Success/Failure ratio is weird as we had 161'151 Success and 117'770 Failures. Some Packages, like a Version of JavaRuntime, had 1'668 Downloads but 39'775 Failures. These numbers do not reflect the full Year as the RuckZuck Back-end was updated in July/August and I only have the numbers from the new Infrastructure...

Please: If you automate Software-Distribution with RuckZuck, keep an eye on your Success/Failure ratio and do not bomb RuckZuck with thousands of Requests... If a Package failed 10 times in series it will also fail the next 100 times...
Otherwise your IP can be blocked for a while.

Failures are important to identify broken links. Every failure will trigger an installation in a Sandbox to verify if it's a false positive or not. If you want to support this project by verifying failures, you can run a Test-Bot in a Win10 Sandbox

Since August 2019, 1'382 Packages where created. That's an average of ~9 Packages/Day... Thanks to all the contributors, who support this project by reporting Issues or creating Packages !!!

If I compare the usage of Packages, I can say that 20% of the Packages are used 80% of time... In other words, 80% of the work is only for 20% of the clients. As more and more enterprise customers are using RuckZuck it will become even more... I think 500 Packages in the Repository is manageable number, I do not have interests to have every little Software in this Repo. That's why I will also drop Products if there are not used...

Infrastructure

The Infrastructure of RuckZuck has changed completely since 2018:

  • Redis cache removed
  • SQL removed
  • no RuckZuck Account DB (..nothing can leak -> GDPR)
  • Repository uploads are anonymous. You can enter your email address on the Author attribute if you want some feedback, but this Attribute is removed during approval.
  • Azure Blob/Table storage for the Repository
  • support for OnPrem RuckZuck Servers acting as Proxy and/or for local Repositories
  • Content Delivery Network (CDN) for global caching of Metadata and..
  • some Packages are already using RuckZuck CDN to distribute the binaries. Reasons can be:
    • Vendor removed Product or Web-Site closed, but Product-Updates are still important
    • Vendor Web Site has very poor performance
    • Vendor does block non-interactive downloads but the license allows redistribution
  • SignalR for real-time messages on the Web-Site (Service Bus is still there... )
  • Azure Functions to side load some work
  • Azure Log Analytics for monitoring
  • Server REST API is now running on .NET Core 3.1 -> try the latest Docker Image if you want to cache the packages OnPrem..

Back-End activity example (one hour):
Application Insights
I've found two Sponsors to cover the costs for the Infrastructure. Thanks to itnetX and baseVISION to keep this thing running!

Let's look forward and see what happens in 2020 ....