News

CloudBees Java PaaS Now on Verizon Cloud

• By John K. Waters
• February 25, 2014

Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider CloudBees is partnering with broadband and wireless services provider Verizon to offer a version of its platform on the new Verizon Cloud, the two companies announced.

Verizon unveiled its cloud computing and storage platform in October 2013, inviting interested companies to sign up through the Verizon Enterprise Solutions Web site. Now in public beta, the Verizon Cloud comprises an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform, a cloud compute service (Verizon Cloud Compute), and an object-based storage service (Verizon Cloud Storage). The platform is being developed for the enterprise, but will be "nimble enough to meet the needs of small and medium-sized businesses, individual IT departments, and software developers," the company says.

The CloudBees Continuous Delivery Platform (CCD) 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. CCD combines cloud-based development using the CloudBees platform and the open-source, Java-based Jenkins continuous integration (CI) server. The company is 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. The company has contributed several plugins to the Jenkins community.

Analysts at Gartner consider the CloudBees platform to an Application-Platform-as-a-Service (aPaaS), and included the company in its first Magic Quandrant for that product category in January. Gartner analysts define an aPaaS as "a PaaS that is designed to enable runtime deployment, management and maintenance of cloud business application services."

The company considers the cloud itself to be "a dynamic execution environment," company founder Sacha Labourey told ADTmag in an earlier interview. The CCD approach supports agile development by addressing the growing demand to shorten the feedback loops in the dev cycle, which Gartner analyst Nathan Wilson has said is fast becoming an enterprise requirement.

CloudBees announced the integration of its PaaS with Amazon Web Services Elastic Beanstalk in November 2013. It's also available through Google's App Engine and Cloud Foundry. Earlier this year, Verizon announced plans to enable Oracle Database and Fusion Middleware on its nascent cloud infrastructure.

CloudBees is best known as one of the Java-based PaaS specialists. The Belgium-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.

CloudBees integrated its DEV@cloud with VMware's CloudFoundry PaaS in 2012. That integration allows developers to deploy Web and mobile apps to CloudFoundry.com. And the company's RUN@cloud platform integrates with Google App Engine.