News

Java PaaS CloudBees Donates 5 Plugins to Jenkins

• By John K. Waters
• April 24, 2012

Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider CloudBees continues its support of the open source, Java-based Jenkins continuous integration (CI) tool by contributing five plugins to the community.

Three of the plugins were proprietary; two were open source. They're designed variously to allow Jenkins users to manage multiple projects, backup their Jenkins configurations to the cloud, spot time wasted by jobs waiting to be serviced, store credentials in Jenkins and discover file leaks.

The three formerly proprietary plugins were developed by CloudBees for enterprises. Among them is Folders, which provides one of the most requested features by the community: the ability to create hierarchical folders. Backup Scheduling allows users to backup job configurations, build records and system configurations to the cloud. And the Wasted Minutes plugin throws a spotlight on time wasted due to jobs waiting for executor resources.

Two of the plugins were developed by CloudBees as a member of the open source community. The File Leak Detector plugin is designed to help Jenkins users to diagnose the "too many open files" problem, the company says. Specifically, it monitors the file descriptor open/close activities of a Java Virtual Machine, and provides a list of which files are open and which Java call stack opened them. The Credentials plugin gives Jenkins uses the ability to store credentials, and provides a standardized API for other plugins to store and retrieve different types of credentials.

CloudBees provides a growing list of its free and open source Jenkins plugins on the Web.

CloudBees is best known as one of the few providers of a Java-based PaaS. The Boston-based company's flagship 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 designed to allow dev teams to deploy their applications to production on the cloud.

Disagreements last year about Oracle's decision to migrate the open source Hudson project to its java.net infrastructure, along with Oracle's decision to trademark the Hudson name, led members of that community to vote to rename the project "Jenkins" and move the code from java.net to GitHub. Shortly thereafter, Oracle surprised the community by contributing the Hudson code, domain name and trademark to the Eclipse Foundation. Kohsuke Kawaguchi, who created Hudson and instigated the Jenkins fork, is an elite developer and architect at CloudBees.

"As Jenkins usage among enterprises increases, users and administrators face an increasing set of challenges," Kawaguchi said in a statement, "from reliance on Jenkins for mission-critical application development, to complex environments containing many masters and build machines in their Jenkins configurations." The donation of the plugins brings enterprise-level capabilities to Jenkins users," he said.

The Boston-based CloudBees was founded in 2010 by Sacha Labourey, ex-CTO of JBoss/Red Hat Middleware. The company touts its deep technical roots and its mission to focus PaaS on applications, not servers or virtual machines.