News

Java PaaS Provider CloudBees Grows Its Ecosystem

• By John K. Waters
• August 20, 2012

Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider CloudBees has added six vendors to its partner ecosystem, adding new services the company says will fill more holes in the road for Java jocks rolling toward the cloud.

"You have more and more development taking place in the cloud these days," CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey told ADTmag. "The partners coming into our ecosystem represent that trend pretty well, but also a lot of other things are going on in the cloud -- information tracking, data storage and integration, mobile backend services, log management. These new partners provide developers with access to even more platform-based services that help them build, test, and deploy Java applications in the cloud."

The list of "Verified Solution" partners -- vendors tested and certified by CloudBees -- includes Hewlett-Packard's Application Lifecycle Intelligence (ALI) service, which aggregates information from multiple dev tools to establish, the company says, "complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) traceability." The CloudBees partnership connects data from the Jenkins Continuous Integration (CI) server directly into the HP ALM/ALI service.

"Some of the new partners -- like HP -- were especially interested in that mix between Jenkins and the cloud," Labourey said.

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. And the company contributed five plugins to the Jenkins community earlier this year. A growing list of its free and open source Jenkins plugins is available on the company's Web site.  

That new-partner list also includes Librato Metrics, provider of server-based business monitoring as a service in the cloud; EnterpriseDB, whose Postgres Plus Cloud Database is designed to provide Database as a Service (DBaaS) environments based on the open-source Postgres DB; FoxWeave, a data integration service; Logentries, a provider of a cloud-based log management and system intelligence platform; and CloudMine, a provider of server-side components out-of-the-box for mobile app developers.

"Five years ago, all of these kinds of services would have been available as a set of open source projects that you would integrate as part of your application, but at the code level," said Labourey. "You would take the JBoss ESB, for example, remove what you don't need, and keep the ESB, using your application to integrate with third-party systems. I think we are slowly moving away from that. I think a lot of developers now don't even want to mess with that code. They want to focus on their own code. And this ecosystem of third-party services allows them to do that."

The Boston-based CloudBees was founded in 2010 by Labourey, a former JBoss CTO. The company is probably best known as one of the few providers of a Java-based PaaS. Its 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 in 2011 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.