CloudBees Exits PaaS Business to Focus on Jenkins

Five Steps to Prepare for the Global Intercloud

Over the last couple of years, Jenkins has emerged as a critical open source tool for managing the continuous integration process that enables most agile application development efforts. One of the primary forces behind the success of Jenkins is CloudBees which, besides providing support for Jenkins, also markets a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment for developing cloud applications.

Today, CloudBees announced it is getting out of the PaaS business to focus exclusively on Jenkins. As part of that effort, CloudBees also announced today a partnership with Pivotal under which the EMC subsidiary will make available Jenkins Enterprise by CloudBees as a plug-in tool for the commercial implementation of the open source Cloud Foundry PaaS environment that Pivotal is bringing to market.

CloudBees Senior Vice President Steve Harris says the Pivotal CF PaaS environment will be one of the primary PaaS options that CloudBees intends to help its existing PaaS customer base migrate to as it winds down support for its PaaS.

With the rise of Cloud Foundry, it’s natural that consolidation among the early PaaS vendors would be inevitable. Rather than become marginalized in the face of all the vendor momentum behind Cloud Foundry, CloudBees is opting to focus on a part of its business that is more mature. Harris says that with the adoption of agile development methodologies, Jenkins has already emerged as a de facto standard for continuous integration in the enterprise.

For a variety of reasons, most organizations today still release software on a particular date. But from a purely technical perspective, continuous integration makes it possible to simply update software when it is ready. Providers of consumer applications on the Web, for example, almost never formally announce an application upgrade. They just regularly add new features as part of the customer experience. It’s hard to say whether the average enterprise will ever achieve the same level of continuous integration. But it is certain that days of upgrading software every two years are fading away in favor of a much smoother application deployment process that winds up being a whole lot less disruptive to the organization as whole.