Takari, the Maven-focused company started by Maven founder Jason van Zyl, announced that Maven Central is now mirrored on Google Cloud Storage. Maven Central is the central repository where many open source Java libraries publish their artifacts. Dependent applications can automatically pull down these artifacts using dependency management systems like Maven (via the Wagon transport abstraction), Apache Ivy and Gradle.

Google Cloud Storage allows users to store unlimited data on Google’s infrastructure in containers called buckets, claiming faster performance, reliability, and availability for use cases such as web hosting, archiving and disaster recovery

The partnership provides Maven users with APIs and libraries to mine the large quantities of data produced by Maven Central. To try this new mirror in your local developer environment, configure it in your settings.xml, usually installed at ~/.m2/settings.xml .

<settings> <mirrors> <mirror> <id>google-maven-central</id> <name>Google Maven Central</name> <url>https://maven-central.storage.googleapis.com</url> <mirrorOf>central</mirrorOf> </mirror> </mirrors> </settings>

van Zyl provides a storied history of Maven Central in the aforementioned announcement link, where he describes the evolution of Maven Central, Sonatype’s efforts in maintaining it and the creation of Google’s mirror.