News

CloudBees Offers New One-Click Services, Google App Engine Support

• By John K. Waters
• October 6, 2012

Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider CloudBees recently announced two new developer-focused services and news that its implementation of the Jenkins continuous integration (CI) server has been extended to Google's App Engine.

The services -- dubbed ClickStarts and ClickStacks -- are essentially one-click operations for customizing the platform and simplifying end-to-end app deployments across user-defined runtimes. The company describes ClickStarts as a service designed to "reduce to a single click everything you need to create and deploy a running application that builds from source." ClickStacks are designed to allow developers to customize CloudBees runtimes and create new ones.

Developers can create their own ClickStarts and ClickStacks, but CloudBees is also providing a set of modifiable services that use such languages and frameworks as Scala, Clojure, Spring, Grails, Hibernate, JAX-RS, Sencha Touch and Lift, among others. The services can also be embedded in their own projects.

CloudBees is introducing these services, the company said, because traditional platforms (such as Java EE) "have not kept pace with the new dynamic execution environments of the cloud, as well as the expectations of developers who need to create new value by leveraging hosted services."

Because the Application-Platform-as-a-Service (APaaS) market is so new, Gartner analyst Yefim Natis expects to see architectural changes over the next three years. The potential result, he says, is "discontinuities in programming frameworks and platform characteristics."

"Traditional platforms will need to change to deliver the cloud requirements of elastic scalability, multi-tenancy, continuous versioning and global 24/7 access to services," Natis said in a statement. "Choose an aPaaS with these capabilities in mind to aim for both immediate benefits and long term viability in your chosen cloud platform."

CloudBees also announced that Google App Engine (GAE) developers can sign up to use the company's DEV@cloud through their existing Google accounts, and deploy directly to the GAE. DEV@cloud is one of the company's two flagship products. It's a service designed to allow developers to take their build and test environments to the cloud. It includes a hosted Jenkins service, as well as integrated partner services that can be added with a click. The company's other flagship product, RUN@cloud, is a traditional deployment PaaS designed to allow dev teams to deploy their applications to production on the cloud.

CloudBees is a big supporter of the open-source, Java-based Jenkins CI tool. Kohsuke Kawaguchi, who created the Hudson CI server and instigated the Jenkins fork, is an elite developer and architect at CloudBees. The company continues to contribute plugins to the Jenkins community. A growing list of its free and open source Jenkins plugins is available here.

CloudBees developers Ryan Campbell and Stephen Connolly explained how Jenkins on GAE works earlier this week on Google's App Engine Blog: "Google App Engine users can now run Jenkins continuous integration in the cloud by signing up at appengine.cloudbees.com," they wrote. "Jenkins will monitor your projects' source code for any changes, run the necessary builds and tests, and notify your team of any problems - or automatically deploy the application to Google App Engine if everything looks good."

The Boston-based CloudBees was founded in 2010 by Sacha Labourey, a former JBoss CTO. The company is probably best known as one of the few providers of a Java-based PaaS.

More information about Jenkins for Google App Engine is available here.