News

Java PaaS Provider Pushes App Changes through the Cloud

• By John K. Waters
• March 27, 2013

Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider CloudBees has added another arrow to its accelerating-software-development-with-hosted-services quiver.

Dubbed Continuous Cloud Delivery (CCD), it's a method that leverages the company's cloud platform to speed up application delivery so developers can better cope with the high-frequency updates required by the burgeoning catalog of Web and mobile apps.

In a nutshell, CCD combines cloud-based development using the CloudBees platform and the open-source, Java-based Jenkins continuous integration (CI) server. The 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. DEV@cloud comes with Jenkins, which forked from Hudson. The two products are available together and separately.

The company considers the cloud to be "a dynamic execution environment," company founder Sacha Labourey told ADTmag in an earlier interview. And the CCD approach supports agile development by addressing the growing demand to shorten all the feedback loops in the dev cycle, which Gartner analyst Nathan Wilson says is fast becoming an enterprise requirement. In his paper, "Achieving Continuous Delivery," Wilson writes: "Some companies have reduced the feedback loop even further by deploying each new feature as soon as it is completed. This provides immediate feedback on how the code actually works in production"

The Boston-based CloudBees is probably best known as one of the few providers of a Java-based PaaS. But the company is also a big supporter of Jenkins. 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 here.

In February, CloudBees announced the integration of its DEV@cloud with VMware's CloudFoundry PaaS. The integration allows developers to deploy web and mobile apps to CloudFoundry.com. And the company's RUN@cloud platform integrates with Google App Engine.