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...

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...