Bickel Blog

CloudBees is in an interesting position being so far ahead of the rest of the competitors in the Java PaaS space. We have a GA offering that is basically competing with Beta versions from VMWare ( Cloud Foundry ) and Red Hat ( OpenShift ). So we have to price our full offering ahead of our competitors. We all have free versions. Given the market is early, this might be the most important thing today given that a lot of people want to experiment and learn and understand how the Cloud can play in their development and deployment cycles. It is likely we will all keep free versions. For example, CloudBees offers up to 300 free minutes of Jenkins build time per month on the dev side ( lots more for Open Source Projects ) and up to 5 apps on the RUN@cloud side. Of course those 5 free apps are not scalable, or have high availability or have SSL or have custom URL's. But certainly very useful for learning, testing and even small apps that are non-critical. The interesting part come...

To date there have been several ways to monetize open source projects: - Don't. Just donate your time and code. - S ugardaddy. Get a job at a big company that embeds your open source project in other products that make money. - Services. Do consulting or training. - "Pro" version. This is where most of the scalable open source businesses have gone like Red Hat, MySQL, JBoss, Spring, etc. This is typically some combination of support, packaging of bits, and enhanced features like the Red Hat or JBoss Network. For those open source projects looking to expand, there was often frustration that only a few percent of the users who were all gaining value form the project would actually pay anything. This has limited growth. Look at RedHat being a $1B company and VMWare being a $2B+ (much younger) company. The reason is quite simple - there are free ways to get Red Hat's technology and you have to pay VMWare to get their technology. Well, the Cloud has opened up a...

I spent 6 hours yesterday at the Goldman Cloud conference . I figured I would write up the highlights... It was a full room of investors and a few industry insiders. The panelists were all mid-cap to large-cap firms. What was interesting is some of the missing companies. No IBM or HP, which I don't mind since they take such a portfolio view of the world and seem to not be on the cutting edge. But the big missing company was Amazon. It was funny to hear companies like Rackspace diss them as a niche vendor. The one data point I heard was Cloud Computing will grow to $44B (10% of IT spending) in 2013, up from $17B (5%) today. SaaS is big driver. CIOs accept it. One of the banks that was there talked about how they are doing private and public cloud now and saving about 20%. Brian Byun of VMWare was on two panels. I found him to be the brightest start int he room. Very direct and clear on their vision and obviously executing well. He had a numebr of statements in his first pane...

Last week we got another hint that CloudBees is moving in the right direction when IBM announced their Cloud offering for Development and Testing . I was raised in an IBM family, read Buck Rogers book when I was younger, my Father feared for me when I did not go to work for IBM, and heard the “You never get fired for going with IBM” line more than a few times. While some make fun of IBM, I do have an inbred healthy respect for them. They have superlative marketing and well-thought-out positioning. They have a huge installed base that mirrors the market, although perhaps a bit on the laggard side so their customers feel “safe”. This announcement reflects all of that. It has compelling benefits for the customer: “Traditional development and testing environments pose several challenges: high labor and capital costs, long development cycles and greater risk for configuration errors. Developers are now finding ways to meet these challenges using cloud computing.” It includes a clear h...

It looks like the big guys are following the lead that CloudBees took back in August to bring Cloud Services to developers and QA groups. Spring announced its upcoming (Q1, 2011) Code2Cloud offering this week - http://www.springsource.com/code2cloud . It is a nice announcement that reconfirms the direction that CloudBees – www.CloudBees.com is taking. The Cloud can definitely bring Development and QA processes great improvements in costs and agility. Spring seems to be focusing its early Cloud efforts on trying to tie it easily to Eclipse and several other projects like Mylyn, Git, Hudson and Bugzilla. The basic idea is that a developer sitting in Eclipse can run services that reside in the Cloud. Since it is several months away for Beta, it is difficult to tell how open or scalable it will be. For example, there was no mention of Maven, SVN, Ant, scalability for Hudson, or long term positioning of a Java PaaS. CloudBees has taken a different approach for our first version of DE...

Great announcement. The only problem with it is that it is not available today. But today will come soon enough... For SalesForce, this is a huge step in saying they want to be a major Cloud deployment platform. They want all Java apps to run on their infrastructure - it is no longer about just hosting their own programming model. This also jumps up a level from what Amazon and Google and Rackspace are offering in terms of ease of use and deployment for Java apps. And of course their trump card is access to their database and apps and users - the thing that has proved a virtuous cycle of bringing 3rd party apps and more customers to SalesForce. For VMWare and Spring, it is a major proof point of their platform and applicability for the Cloud. It gives them a solid use-case to focus their development efforts on to adapt Spring to the new era of Cloud-enabling middleware (not a trivial task), and provides a clear higher level use case for moving to the Cloud. Of course VMWare and ...

This is not one of my usual social networking blogs, but I thought it was semi-related. Clearly the "Cloud" is one of the biggest changes happening on the web today. However, one of the concerns is how to track down if my application is down or the cloud service is down? Hyperic has just released CloudStatus BETA . This is the first tool that I know if that actually checks the availability and performance statistics of cloud services. In this first Beta, they do the 5 core Amazon cloud services: EC2 (Compute), S3 (Storage), Simple Query Service, Simple DB, and Flexible Payment Service. You can drill down one ach of these to see thruput of I/O in Europe and the US for example. Think of the next step - providing a common management platform to monitor my own apps as well as the cloud - all correlated together to make sure Web 2.0 operations teams have the best visibility to manage and monitor their critical services (like Social Web;). Note: I am on the board at Hyperic, ...