News

Java PaaS Provider CloudBees Launches Integrated Partner Ecosystem

• By John K. Waters
• June 22, 2011

Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) company CloudBees launched a new partner program this week designed to extend its platform to support other cloud services. The new CloudBees Ecosystem is designed to bring cloud-based services from the company's partners directly to developers within the CloudBees platform.

CloudBees is one of the few providers of a Java-based PaaS. The Boston-based company's platform comprises two products: DEV@cloud, a service designed to allow developers to take their build and test environments to the cloud, and RUN@cloud, a traditional deployment PaaS that lets dev teamsdeploy their applications to production on the cloud. DEV@cloud comes with the open source continuous integration server Jenkins, which recently forked from Hudson. The two products are available together and separately.

"Our overarching vision has always been to be the one-stop PaaS for Java," said Harpreet Singh, senior director of product management. "We'll support other languages in the future -- there's nothing in our internal design that restricts other languages -- but for now we're focused on solving the Java pain points for developers. But we realize that we won't be the one-stop answer for every developer. We're now more like the hub in a hub-and-spoke model."

The CloudBees ecosystem is the first "for-pay, generally available platform" offering easy access to multiple services for building, deploying, testing, managing and monitoring Java web apps in the cloud, Singh said.

The new CloudBees Ecosystem is launching with five partners: Sauce Labs, JFrog and Sonarsource on the dev side; New Relic and Cloudant on the run side. Sauce Labs is a Web apps testing company with cloud-based services for running automated cross-browser functional tests. JFrog provides a cloud-based binary repository manager. Sonarsource is a provider of static and dynamic code analysis via the open source Sonar project. New Relic is an all-in-one Web app cloud performance management tool. And Cloudant offers a data platform based on the open source Apache CouchDB project.

Developers gain access to these services via the CloudBees platform; CloudBees handles the details of setting up the account with the partner. Once a service is activated, developers can manage and monitor them from within the CloudBees management console.

Boston-based CloudBees was founded in 2010 by Sacha Labourey, ex-CTO of JBoss/Red Hat Middleware. The company emerged from stealth mode in August of that year, and made its first acquisition -- Java PaaS competitor Stax Networks -- in November. The company touts its deep technical roots and its mission to focus PaaS on applications (not servers or virtual machines) and it bills itself as the only provider. The CloudBees platform products have been available since January 2011.

"In the last decade, the IT industry came up with the idea of application servers to simplify the development of applications," Labourey said in an earlier statement. "Now that we have the cloud, we cannot simply throw those application servers into the cloud and call it a done deal. This is merely hosting. What we need to do is really redevelop cloud native application server, and we call that platform as a service."

The company announced the new partner ecosystem at the JAX 2011 conference, underway this week in San Jose, Calif. Singh is scheduled to lead a session at the conference on Thursday, entitled: "Managing Development to Deployment in the Cloud."