In a recent report, a team of Forrester analysts identified IT Service Management Processes (ITSM) as crucial to making the transition into cloud computing and that it is critical in the adoption of a best practice model.

To make sure we’re all on the same page, ITSM is a process-based practice with the ultimate goal of aligning the delivery of IT services with the needs of an enterprise. There are many schools of thought on how to best do this and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) model is internationally recognized as a best practice process for ITSM.

In their report, based on a survey of nearly 500 ITSM professionals, some key benefits were noted as a result of adopting this idea.

1. Improved Productivity: Standardizing processes allows for predictability and reduces errors. Automated Solutions such as Nolio ASAP encourage standardization and boost productivity to levels unmatchable with manual processes.
2. Reduced Operational Costs: Automation and Service Management increase productivity while reducing the load on resources. Though an initial investment will be necessary, a majority of users found ITSM and automation cost-beneficial.

Forrester specifically cited Nolio as a vendor for release and deployment management, explaining that the Nolio solution manages the process, systems and functions necessary for the compilation, building, testing and deployment of a release into the production environment. Automation eases the load of previously labor-intensive operations, freeing up valuable resources that can focus their energy on architecture and innovation.

Businesses and customers alike become frustrated when servers are unavailable as a result of application deployment. In providing an application release management system, downtime is greatly reduced if not eliminated all together.

Click here to learn more about Nolio’s Application Service Automation Platform

About Forrester

Forrester Research is a technology and market research company that provides pragmatic advice to global leaders in business and technology employing hundreds of analysts worldwide.

Cobwebs may be creeping over the blog, but not over Pulse: we’ve just published the first Pulse 2.5 alpha build! The Pulse 2.5 series is focused (even more so than usual) on customer feedback. We’ve got plenty of great ideas from the Pulse community, and we’re folding in some of the best ones in this release series. Updates so far include:

• Browse and dashboard view filtering (by project health).
• A new MSTest post-processor plugin.
• Increased visibility of build (and other) comments.
• Comments on agents, to communicate with other users.
• Properties on agents, for simpler parameterisation.
• The ability to configure SCMs using resources.
• A resource repository on the Pulse master.
• A new option to attach build logs to notification emails.
• Pre-stage hooks, which run just before the stage is dispatched to the agent.
• SCM inclusion filters, complementing existing exclusion filters.
• Inverse resource requirements (i.e. requiring the absence of a resource).
• Smart label renaming.
• A separate permission for the ability to clean up build directories.
• Support for Perforce streams.

There’s plenty more to come in subsequent alpha builds, too. In fact, we’ve started the groundwork for some other larger changes already in 2.5.0.

To grab yourself a fresh-from-the-oven 2.5 alpha build, or just to find out more, head over to our alpha program page.

We're excited to announce that the first Pulse 2.5 alpha build is now available! Pulse 2.5 is very much a user-focused release. We've always used feedback to improve Pulse, and this release is almost entirely feedback-driven. Key updates so far include:

• Browse and dashboard view filtering (by project health).
• A new MSTest post-processor plugin.
• Increased visibility of build (and other) comments.
• Comments on agents, to communicate with other users.
• Properties on agents, for simpler parameterisation.
• The ability to configure SCMs using resources.
• A resource repository on the Pulse master.
• A new option to attach build logs to notification emails.
• Pre-stage hooks, which run just before the stage is dispatched to the agent.
• SCM inclusion filters, complementing existing exclusion filters.
• Inverse resource requirements (i.e. requiring the absence of a resource).
• Smart label renaming.
• A separate permission for the ability to clean up build directories.
• Support for Perforce streams.

More new features and improvements will follow in subsequent alpha builds. Refer to the alpha program page to download 2.5.0 or find out more.

On my run this morning, I caught an absolutely amazing piece on NPR.

Turns out that the world is going Agile. We  - in the technology and software development world, have already learnt what it means to be agile. Its all about making small incremental changes,  delivering it to customers, gathering the feedback and iteratively improving on the software application. But now, even the sleepy book publishing industry is getting into the action.

Imagine starting a book as a table of contents – a roadmap of sorts for the book that describes the overall theme of the book.  The author writes the first chapter and the reader audience – the customers, provide feedback on the content. And the subsequent chapters (and even the following table of content) changes per the reader likes/dislikes. The feedback is instantaneous, the changes are quick and the final book is to the customer satisfaction. A joint collaboration between the author and the reader – One only wonders what would have happened if we would have put Dickens through this process  :-)

This company Sourcebook - http://www.sourcebooks.com/entering-the-shift-age/99-blog/1941-sourcebooks-agile-publishing.html#comments is providing an Agile Publishing Model (APM) to support this kind of interaction with its readers.

Pretty awesome to see the development world revolution wake up the publishing industry.

What do you guys think – have you guys seen other industries being transformed by agile practices?

With the JUC Paris 2012 call for papers open, it's important to mention that we are also looking for sponsors for the various Jenkins User Conferences that are being planned around the world right now!

Currently there are four conferences being put together right now:

• JUC Paris
• JUC New York
• JUC San Francisco
• JUC Antwerp

If your company is heavily invested in Jenkins or interested in reaching the kind of audience that will be at a JUC (highly technical, motivated) then you should consider becoming a sponsor one of these conferences (link below)!

Sponsor the Jenkins User Conference

With the JUC Paris 2012 call for papers open, it's important to mention that we are also looking for sponsors for the various Jenkins User Conferences that are being planned around the world right now!

Currently there are four conferences being put together right now:

• JUC Paris
• JUC New York
• JUC San Francisco
• JUC Antwerp

If your company is heavily invested in Jenkins or interested in reaching the kind of audience that will be at a JUC (highly technical, motivated) then you should consider becoming a sponsor one of these conferences (link below)!

Sponsor the Jenkins User Conference

Nolio’s innovative Application Release Automation Platform is better than ever before!

Numerous global enterprises, online services and SaaS businesses already rely on Nolio to meet the mounting challenges and complexities of releasing and managing applications across the data center.  In November 2011, we released the new and improved ASAP 3.3. Now we’re happy to announce a release update, offering more features and benefits to improve your user experience.

The ASAP 3.3 updated release includes new features and enhancements related to actions, execution, design, installation, reporting, administration and open API. I’d like to take this opportunity to highlight a couple of the updates that you will see in the latest version of Nolio ASAP!

F5 Enhanced Action Pack: Our latest out-of-the-box actions allow customers to include the traffic and access management capabilities of their F5 products directly into their Zero Touch Deploymentâ„¢ Processes, reducing manual efforts, increasing the quality and speed of the overall application release process and eliminating downtime.

Improved Publish Mechanism: Test, version and consolidate your release know how! Nolio ASAP consolidates your application ‘know-how’ into a single repository, eliminating release conflicts and enabling release management for any application and data center environment. This allows release teams from across development, QA and operations to share and transfer their operational knowledge. With the latest upgrade, the time required for the publishing mechanism to work has been reduced even more!

How can you get this update? For Nolio customers using ASAP 3.2.1 and above, the upgrade packages can be retrieved using the ‘Check for Update’ menu in your Nolio UI. For all other customers, please contact your local Nolio representative or our support team at support@noliosoft.com and we will be happy to provide you with a link to the new release.

Click here to learn more about Nolio ASAP

Click here to learn more about Zero Touch Deploymentâ„¢

(Editor's note: Apologies for the delay in getting this wrap-up out, it's been quite a busy month!)

This year has already been full of milestones, the first of which being our first birthday as an open source project. The second major milestone for the project was that we went to FOSDEM 2012, arguably the largest volunteer-organized and operated open source conference on the planet.

We had a couple of things going on at FOSDEM that merit a mention:

• The Jenkins project had a stand in the K building, the same building where the Free Java, Config and Systems Management, and a few other pertinent dev rooms were located
• The Jenkins project gave away 2 free copies of John Smart's book: "Jenkins: The Definitive Guide" (thanks to O'Reilly!)
• Community member R. Tyler Croy gave a talk on running the Jenkins project infrastructure with Puppet
• The O'Reilly folks brought 10+ Jenkins books to sell at their stand.
• Project founder Kohsuke Kawaguchi and a number of project members held a constructive UI Enhancements discussion.

We were very fortunate to have so many Jenkins contributors in attendance, who all helped with the Jenkins stand, introducing people to Jenkins and much more.

FOSDEM in their own words

(after the break)

Nicholas de Loof:

FOSDEM was for me an opportunity to meet other Jenkins contributors I only knew by IRC nickname. Those two days were awesome to discuss with users on our stand, joke and socialize, as well as having some more technical debates and encourage folks to get involved in the community. Even I couldn't attend the talks I selected on the conference agenda due to room being full, I really enjoyed this 100% geek weekend.

Christopher Orr:

The people, the talks, the social events, the sheer size of FOSDEM all make for a pretty inspiring weekend. And incredibly, it's all for free.

You can not help but feel motivated after attending. You always learn something new, discover myriad projects -- in niches you never knew existed -- and talk to smart folk from all over.

Talking to people at the Jenkins stand was no different. Though in a striking number of cases, people had already heard of Jenkins, were big fans and took a clutch of stickers back home for their colleagues.

Speaking with those who weren't yet using Jenkins was equally
interesting. My favourite was talking to one guy who described a
particularly complex workflow; at each step he asked if Jenkins could do it, and I was able to cheerily reply "yes" to every single one.

Getting to put faces to names of Jenkins developers was also a huge plus, and resulted in numerous great conversations.

Domi:

It was great to get some faces to the short names on IRC. Talking to other commiters was awesome, I thought they are cool before I went to FOSDEM, but now I know!

Its was great to talk to people who are using the tools you are working on, there where so many just coming up to say thank you! (?and there where/are by far more then I thought!) I know I'm standing on the shoulders of a giant - but I also do feel that my commitment is of value for others too.

Feels great to be part of this community!

R Tyler Croy:

I spent so much time at the stand telling people about Jenkins or showing them, that I only ended up seeing a couple actual sessions the whole weekend. The kinds of people who came to talk to us almost entirely developers of one kind or another, which was really great to talk about how Jenkins can be used effectively for Perl shops, for Python, C++, C#, Java (of course) or even for deployment automation. The spread was a pretty big endorsement, I think, of the extensible nature of the Jenkins plugin ecosystem. In planning for FOSDEM I had urged Kohsuke to order thousands of stickers for the event, and when all was said and done I think we had given away around 1000 stickers to new Jenkins fans, old Jenkins fans and a few folks in the community who were looking forward to going back to their local JUG to share.

I'm looking forward to making the trip to the bitter cold of Brussels in February again next year.

Fred G:

FOSDEM had lots of interesting talks and was very well organized (from my point of view) and best of all... it's free! Apart from the talks and nice lineup of speakers, it has been a great opportunity to meet people. People I already knew, some in person, some only from IRC, the mailing list, or as a maintainer of a plugin; but also people thatcame up to the Jenkins stand.

From the people that I talked to: - 60% knew Jenkins and use it every day ("Yeah, I know Jenkins. The whole company uses it and nothing works without it!") - 35% had heard of it or were very interested ("I know Jenkins, but we bought the Atlassian package and now we have to use Bamboo, Jira and Confluence." [me mentioning the Jira integration of Jenkins] "Wow, I really have to try that out and convince our team to switch to Jenkins!". - 5% Weirdos and WTF!? (disgusted "Is this another one of these
projects funded by Red Hat? They fund everything!")

Meeting Tom Huybrechts without knowing it (at first) was a big
suprise. He has created or contributed to some of the best plugins
(eg. the parameterized-trigger plugin) and I see his name at least
once whenever I browse through core source code. During the impromptu UI enhancement meetings he showed us another three plugins that he wrote but never made public just because he doesn't have time to support them all.

Then at the stand he casually mentioned that he is administering
around 3000 jobs on 100+ build machines. At the same time he seems
like a very humble and low key character.
To sum it up, the best thing about an open source project like Jenkins is the community. Working together with nice people from all over the world to create the best CI server has been a great experience. The FOSDEM weekend was another event that proved that. I'll definitely come back.

Kohsuke Kawaguchi:

FOSDEM is one of the few conferences that has a distinctive hand-made geek-for-geek feeling to it. No marketing people, no bullshit flyers, but lots of technical folks and good beer. I really enjoyed talking to users, as always, but above all I was very happy to see developers and project members in the Jenkins community come out in full force, and I felt they enjoyed it just as much. I'm really hoping that we'll now keep this going for years to come.

I think it's safe to assume we'll be back next year for FOSDEM 2013, hope to see you there!

(Editor's note: Apologies for the delay in getting this wrap-up out, it's been quite a busy month!)

This year has already been full of milestones, the first of which being our first birthday as an open source project. The second major milestone for the project was that we went to FOSDEM 2012, arguably the largest volunteer-organized and operated open source conference on the planet.

We had a couple of things going on at FOSDEM that merit a mention:

• The Jenkins project had a stand in the K building, the same building where the Free Java, Config and Systems Management, and a few other pertinent dev rooms were located
• The Jenkins project gave away 2 free copies of John Smart's book: "Jenkins: The Definitive Guide" (thanks to O'Reilly!)
• Community member R. Tyler Croy gave a talk on running the Jenkins project infrastructure with Puppet
• The O'Reilly folks brought 10+ Jenkins books to sell at their stand.
• Project founder Kohsuke Kawaguchi and a number of project members held a constructive UI Enhancements discussion.

We were very fortunate to have so many Jenkins contributors in attendance, who all helped with the Jenkins stand, introducing people to Jenkins and much more.

FOSDEM in their own words

(after the break)

Nicholas de Loof:

FOSDEM was for me an opportunity to meet other Jenkins contributors I only knew by IRC nickname. Those two days were awesome to discuss with users on our stand, joke and socialize, as well as having some more technical debates and encourage folks to get involved in the community. Even I couldn't attend the talks I selected on the conference agenda due to room being full, I really enjoyed this 100% geek weekend.

Christopher Orr:

The people, the talks, the social events, the sheer size of FOSDEM all make for a pretty inspiring weekend. And incredibly, it's all for free.

You can not help but feel motivated after attending. You always learn something new, discover myriad projects -- in niches you never knew existed -- and talk to smart folk from all over.

Talking to people at the Jenkins stand was no different. Though in a striking number of cases, people had already heard of Jenkins, were big fans and took a clutch of stickers back home for their colleagues.

Speaking with those who weren't yet using Jenkins was equally
interesting. My favourite was talking to one guy who described a
particularly complex workflow; at each step he asked if Jenkins could do it, and I was able to cheerily reply "yes" to every single one.

Getting to put faces to names of Jenkins developers was also a huge plus, and resulted in numerous great conversations.

Domi:

It was great to get some faces to the short names on IRC. Talking to other commiters was awesome, I thought they are cool before I went to FOSDEM, but now I know!

Its was great to talk to people who are using the tools you are working on, there where so many just coming up to say thank you! (?and there where/are by far more then I thought!) I know I'm standing on the shoulders of a giant - but I also do feel that my commitment is of value for others too.

Feels great to be part of this community!

R Tyler Croy:

I spent so much time at the stand telling people about Jenkins or showing them, that I only ended up seeing a couple actual sessions the whole weekend. The kinds of people who came to talk to us almost entirely developers of one kind or another, which was really great to talk about how Jenkins can be used effectively for Perl shops, for Python, C++, C#, Java (of course) or even for deployment automation. The spread was a pretty big endorsement, I think, of the extensible nature of the Jenkins plugin ecosystem. In planning for FOSDEM I had urged Kohsuke to order thousands of stickers for the event, and when all was said and done I think we had given away around 1000 stickers to new Jenkins fans, old Jenkins fans and a few folks in the community who were looking forward to going back to their local JUG to share.

I'm looking forward to making the trip to the bitter cold of Brussels in February again next year.

Fred G:

FOSDEM had lots of interesting talks and was very well organized (from my point of view) and best of all... it's free! Apart from the talks and nice lineup of speakers, it has been a great opportunity to meet people. People I already knew, some in person, some only from IRC, the mailing list, or as a maintainer of a plugin; but also people thatcame up to the Jenkins stand.

From the people that I talked to: - 60% knew Jenkins and use it every day ("Yeah, I know Jenkins. The whole company uses it and nothing works without it!") - 35% had heard of it or were very interested ("I know Jenkins, but we bought the Atlassian package and now we have to use Bamboo, Jira and Confluence." [me mentioning the Jira integration of Jenkins] "Wow, I really have to try that out and convince our team to switch to Jenkins!". - 5% Weirdos and WTF!? (disgusted "Is this another one of these
projects funded by Red Hat? They fund everything!")

Meeting Tom Huybrechts without knowing it (at first) was a big
suprise. He has created or contributed to some of the best plugins
(eg. the parameterized-trigger plugin) and I see his name at least
once whenever I browse through core source code. During the impromptu UI enhancement meetings he showed us another three plugins that he wrote but never made public just because he doesn't have time to support them all.

Then at the stand he casually mentioned that he is administering
around 3000 jobs on 100+ build machines. At the same time he seems
like a very humble and low key character.
To sum it up, the best thing about an open source project like Jenkins is the community. Working together with nice people from all over the world to create the best CI server has been a great experience. The FOSDEM weekend was another event that proved that. I'll definitely come back.

Kohsuke Kawaguchi:

FOSDEM is one of the few conferences that has a distinctive hand-made geek-for-geek feeling to it. No marketing people, no bullshit flyers, but lots of technical folks and good beer. I really enjoyed talking to users, as always, but above all I was very happy to see developers and project members in the Jenkins community come out in full force, and I felt they enjoyed it just as much. I'm really hoping that we'll now keep this going for years to come.

I think it's safe to assume we'll be back next year for FOSDEM 2013, hope to see you there!

Pulse 2.4.20 has been released. This is a stable build in the 2.4 series. Changes include:

• New error and warning regular expressions in the Xcode post-processor.
• A fix for personal builds with Subversion 1.7 generated patches that involve merges.
• Minor bug fixes.

See the release notes for full details.

Pulse 2.4 packages are available from the downloads page.

The countdown has begun! There is just one week left to sign up for our live webinar ‘Manifest Driven Deployment Automation’. Hundreds of people have already signed up for this highly educational and fascinating webinar which will demonstrate how you can overcome the chaos and complexities of application release and achieve true Zero Touch Deployment™.

This event will be led by Nolio’s Senior Systems Engineer Scott Sumner, who will show how you can fully automate application releases and ensure full control and visibility. In a live demonstration, Mr. Summer will explain how to easily design, maintain and reuse fully automated deployment processes capable of orchestrating constant releases on multi-tier applications and executing across hundreds of servers and varying infrastructures. Following the demo, Mr. Summer will also be available for questions during a dedicated Q&A session at the end of the webinar.

View a sneak preview today! We’ve put some highlights of this webinar online so you can get an idea what to expect – and maybe even start thinking now about questions you want to ask our expert.

Manifest Driven Deployment Automation Preview

There is still time for you to learn about these cutting-edge technologies and pose all your application deployment questions to our expert. Registration for this event is still open! However, spaces are filling up fast so we recommend you register online now to avoid disappointment.

This free webinar will be held on Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012 at 11am EST/4pm GMT.

Click here to register for ‘Manifest Driven Deployment Automation’

Click here to learn more about Zero Touch Deploymentâ„¢

Click here to learn more about Nolio’s Solutions.

Accurev are doing a webinar: ‘Top 5 Processes Challenges with SCM’ [link] Coverity have adopted a rock and roll theme for their new development testing product, and they are doing a...

Visit The Build Doctor for the full article.

We’re happy to announce the release of XFD 0.2.18! As well as improving our own tests and code quality, we added some of your requested features. These include: Gravatar support Broken builds...

Visit The Build Doctor for the full article.

Overview
Jenkins is a continuous integration switchboard centralizing the communication with many different protocols, such as SSH, Git and SVN. This blog entry will focus on the IRC protocol and how one can turn Jenkins into IRC bot with the IRC plugin.

When the IRC plugin is installed and configured, Jenkins can send notification messages to a chat room (or channel), such as build information, and users can send messages to Jenkins to obtain information and perform actions, such as builds.

Stable Release Versions
The latest release of the IRC plugin is 2.18 and was released in November 2011. It has known issues.

Requirements for Plugin-Use
Jenkins 1.392 or newer and the utility plugin "instant-messaging" (called "Instant Messaging plugin").

How to Use
To demonstrate the use of the IRC bot plugin I first set up a test channel at FreeNode called ##jenkins-irc-bot-test. Then I configured Jenkins, from the main configuration page, to connect to FreeNode and that channel:


Using the Mac OS Colloquy chat client, I can connect to the same channel and also connect to Jenkins itself for the configured nickname, jenkins-irc-bot-nick, and send commands, such as !jenkins help that lists all the commands:

The command prefix !jenkins identifies a chat message as a command and is configurable from the IRC configuration section of the main Jenkins configuration page.

I set up a job called test and then "chatted" a few commands:

The transcript shows that I first listed all the jobs and also obtained the status of the job test. Then I built job test, checking the queue, and finally checking the status again. The chat room (or channel) ##jenkins-irc-bot-test shows that there are two new messages:

Jenkins is sending messages that the test job was started and completed. I configured the job test to send such messages:


How to Use the Plugins on DEV@cloud/RUN@cloud?The IRC plugin is available to install on a DEV@cloud Jenkins instance on CloudBees Platform as a Service (PaaS) and it may be used in the same manner as with any other Jenkins deployment.

Relevant Documentation

• IRC plugin page
• Instant Messaging plugin page

--Paul Sandoz, Developer
CloudBeeswww.cloudbees.com

Hi, I would like to know when Registration for CITCON Singapore open to register? Thanks.

One key goal of continuous deployment is to reduce the risk of releasing software. Counter-intuitively, increased throughput and increased production stability are not a zero-sum game, and effective continuous deployment actually reduces the risk of any individual release. In the course of teaching continuous delivery and talking to people who implement it, I’ve come to see that “doing it right” can be reduced to four principles:

• Low-risk releases are incremental.
• Decouple deployment and release.
• Focus on reducing batch size.
• Optimize for resilience.

Read the rest of this article on InformIT (free, no registration required)

Tweet

I’m back to Tokyo this and next week, doing all sorts of Jenkins related (and other CloudBees related) activities.

First was the Developer Summit, a two-day developer conference. It covers wide range of topics from mobile to web, agile to industry designs. Yesterday I’ve done a lightening talk, trying to convince them the importance of communicating and sharing (be it code, blog, etc.) The subtext was to do so in English, ideally, so that the rest of the world can see all the great stuff that they are doing, which for me has been a constant struggle in the Jenkins community. During this lightning talk the moderator asked the audience how many of them already use Jenkins, and about 1/3 of the hands went up. Then he asked how many already knew Jenkin, and about another 1/3 went up. So I was quite encouraged.

Today in its 2nd day, I’m doing my high-level Jenkins talk, trying to spread the words and explaining why CI (especially in the context of abidance of computing power) isn’t a transient phenomena, but instead a profound shift in how we develop.

On Tuesday next week, we’ll be doing the 5th Tokyo Jenkins user meetup. Thanks to the usual suspects in the Japanese Jenkins community and a kind offer from Rakuten (a Japanese equivalent of Yahoo, would be the best way to describe this company, I think), this time we’ve got a huge venue, but we’ve already filled up all 110 seats. We have a great speaker line-up, folks from Rakuten and Mixi (a Japanese equivalent of Facebook) discussing how they deploy CI in those large organizations.

I’ve heard from many yesterday that they couldn’t get in because seats are full. In one of those days, I’d really love to bring Jenkins User Conference to Tokyo in some shape. We’ll have to do with a lot less CloudBees involvement (and that means I need to find someone else who can help organize the event, as those things are quite a bit of work), but I think it’d be worth it.

The day after that, I’ll be with Mamezou (whom CloudBees partner with to deliver training in Tokyo) and do a short introductory talk/demo on Jenkins. Whereas the user meetup is more focused on existing users and building relationship among them, this event is more for new users who have no prior experience on Jenkins. Tamagawa-san, who translated “Jenkins the Definitive Guide” to Japanese, would also come to give a presentation.

I’ll have my usual one day training on Thursday, then on Friday I’ll be at the cloud user group meet-up to present about the CloudBees platform.

I’ve brought 300 Jenkins stickers with me, but I’ve already handed out about 50 today, and I’m already regretting that I haven’t brought more. The same goes to business cards — I don’t know what it is but Japanese sure loves exchanging business cards!

In between those I’ve got some company visits and other engagements lined up, and if I get lucky I’ll be meeting&drinking with some old friends. This weekend is likely spent preparing for talks and catching up with work during my Europe trip, but I’ve got the next weekend after all my commitments are done, so I should be able to do some unwinding, too.

All in all, it’s going to be a busy week. My apologies in advance for additional delay in e-mail responses, etc.

Our AnyCloud announcement pulls together some important variables in the PaaS equation that enterprises are trying to solve. First, it's clear that you don't need to sacrifice the benefits of a fully serviced PaaS to get low-latency, secure access to your local resources and investments. Sacha covered this in detail, and how AnyCloud means you don't have to choose between public and private PaaS. Second, it further opens up the PaaS marketplace to European developers, who have privacy and regulatory concerns that are much different than their US-based counterparts. François covered these issues. Finally, AnyCloud also brings a unified means to access and interact with deployments regardless of whether you're deploying to a specific region, to a specific hosting provider, or to your local data center. CloudBees can offer this kind of flexibility and unified experience because of our service-based architecture, and I want to cover that in a bit more depth in this post.

When you look at AnyCloud under the covers, you can see that we're following a proven SOA-style, scalable architectural approach. Here, for example, is the way AnyCloud looks in a hybrid, or "tethered" style deployment to your data center or a hosting provider's data center:


Our underlying shared services that we use for Identify/Account Management, Provisioning, and so on, are independent, and all interaction goes through an AMQP-based message bus. Agents are co-located with the services they touch. This approach gives us scale, resilience across lossy networks if needed, and lets us secure interactions properly. It also gives us the flexibility to host services on "any cloud".

The CloudBees PaaS goes a level deeper, though, when we talk about it being service-based, and it's a key distinction compared to a more application-centric approach, such as Heroku, would take. In an app-centric approach, everything starts with creating the application. All resources and management commands are attached to the application itself. This has the advantage of simplicity, and there is little chance of one application affecting another. In an app-centric world, the database can be instantly provisioned for the application and bound to a well-known location. But, if you want to share a database or other resources between applications, it may become difficult. You likely have to invest in an application architecture that makes sharing possible within each app (via REST interfaces, etc), and it becomes difficult for an application to deal with more than one type of the same resource. Furthermore, service partners are not app-centric themselves. Partner accounts must be provisioned for each application that wants to use a service, because each application has its own namespace of resources that it owns and manages.

In a service-centric architecture like CloudBees, no single service is the "primary" service. Instead each service is attached to a CloudBees account, and is able to expose account-level functionality (like its admin UI) and can provision resources that are part of the account that can be referenced by other services or resources in the CloudBees PaaS. Since each service manages its own set of resources, CloudBees exposes binding facilities that allow resources on one service to be bound to resources of another service. So, on CloudBees:

• If you are subscribed to use our Jenkins, Forge, Application, or Database services independently, you can use them together to piece together workflows that make sense for your team. When your application intersects with lots of moving parts internally and externally, and you're pushing toward a more agile continuous delivery approach, you need this flexibility.
• If you want to create an application that uses a database, you create the application and the database separately, and then bind them together to make the database available as a resource inside your application. If you later want to create another database for test, and want to to switch the application to use the test database, you just rebind. In an app-centric architecture, where the application can only connect to the database that was created for it, you would have to tear down the database data and build it all back up, versus just swapping which database your application is using.

These are just two examples where CloudBees' service-based PaaS architecture make hard things simple. They're also classic real-world, important cases in the enterprise. And they're part of the reason that you can expect CloudBees to be a big part of accelerating PaaS adoption in the enterprise this year.

For more information about AnyCloud, download our AnyCloud white paper.

Steven Harris, Senior Vice President of ProductsCloudBeeswww.cloudbees.com

The announcement of our AnyCloud architecture has a significant relevance for cloud computing specifically in Europe and, more generally, for all the regions of the world. Since the cloud is supposed to be global and borderless by nature, why would AnyCloud matter more to some countries or regions than to others? In short, if your product or service is digital and can be delivered on the Internet, you just have to put it online and the world will come to you, right? Well, not so fast…we strongly believe at CloudBees that the ability to reach out to the whole world does not mean that you should ignore local requirements.


Why is AnyCloud an expression of that need to pay attention to local expectations? Because AnyCloud only keeps central what really needs to remain central in a PaaS. And it leaves as much freedom and flexibility as possible to all the other PaaS services in the CloudBees Platform. This is the cloud equivalent of the "think globally, act locally" principle that business consultants have promoted over the last twenty years, aka "glocal", and that many companies still struggle to implement.
Where did we draw the line between central and local in AnyCloud? Basically, shared services such as configuration, management and monitoring remain central, in a unified cloud service, while we decentralize the runtime services that allow applications to be actually deployed and run.
Shared services should remain central because if you just create a PaaS software and then throw it over the wall so that people download it and try to figure out how to make it work, you are not delivering a cloud service, you are just delivering a piece of software, the old way. On the other hand, runtime services should be as decentralized as possible, because this is the only way to truly take into account the diversity of local requirements.
Let's start with two obvious local requirements addressed by AnyCloud, and then we will look at a few regional IT players that will also greatly benefit from AnyCloud.
The first obvious requirement is location of data in your own country. Many countries have put in place legislation in that area. This is a complex topic that is not a cloud question, by the way, since it applies to any company that operates multiple datacenters around the world. The US Patriot Act makes these local laws even more relevant today. This legal environment is in itself a huge driver for AnyCloud. If your company is located in a country or a region where you face such legal constraints, you can now safely use CloudBees' AnyCloud while being fully compliant with local laws.
The second significant local requirement is the ability to connect cloud applications with databases or applications that cannot run in the cloud today. For instance, you might use a legacy ERP system that manages critical master data about customers, suppliers or products. Some of your cloud applications might need to have fast access to these data stores. That might force you to either co-locate your cloud applications with this ERP system or run them at a local hoster who can guarantee a fast connection with your own datacenter. AnyCloud is by design built to support these two deployment scenarios.Beyond location of data and fast connection between cloud applications and non-cloud systems, we think that AnyCloud is also meaningful for many IT players in Europe or in other regions of the world, with a direct impact for end-users.
First of all, regardless of the ubiquitous and borderless nature of the cloud, business relationships and business decisions are still hopefully taking place between human beings. Trust and local understanding remain key dimensions. Therefore, companies want to build on their existing local trust relationships when moving to the cloud, instead of having to rely on a new and anonymous infrastructure provider. However, their existing hosters must be empowered with PaaS technologies that let them focus on their core infrastructure expertise, while delivering the full CloudBees experience. This is where AnyCloud becomes extremely relevant again. Why? Because AnyCloud does not require your hoster to become a PaaS expert and a PaaS software maintainer and manager. Those who try to implement and maintain very complex PaaS software today are struggling and find themselves sidetracked, because maintaining a PaaS mandates very specific skills and experience.
AnyCloud is also very meaningful in Europe for system integrators, in particular SIs with fifty to a few hundred employees who have a strong focus on software development, agile methodologies and web/mobile applications. They are often selected by enterprises, and sometimes by the larger global SIs, to deliver new and innovative IT projects. First, these SIs are embracing our DEV@cloud/Jenkins services right away because, as developers, they clearly see the value the services bring to their own efficiency and reactivity.
Secondly, with AnyCloud, they can now work hand-in-hand with their customers to define the best architecture for them, by smartly combining all the configuration scenarios that are made possible with AnyCloud. Most, if not all, of our highly visible projects in Europe today are supported by this special category of SIs and it helps them differentiate from competition by proposing innovative solutions to their customers.
Last but not least, AnyCloud means a lot to the European Independent Software Vendor (ISV) community. This is a very rich community, with strong ties to specific professions and local legislation, covering a vast array of languages and vertical markets. All of them are in the process of building a SaaS version of their products, or are transforming themselves into a pure SaaS provider. What were their choices until today when looking for a way to deploy their SaaS solutions? How could they implement a reliable and affordable disaster recovery solution? How could they deploy in several countries without facing significant technical and organizational headaches? These questions and many others faced by SaaS providers are now addressed by the CloudBees AnyCloud architecture.
Let me conclude by underlining two core principles that have driven the creation of CloudBees AnyCloud, taken directly from Bob Bickel's recent blog:1. Middleware is now a Service - not Enterprise Software.
2. Deployment of applications and load should be completely flexible and open.
As we have seen in this article, CloudBees has not just delivered on these two principles for the sake of it. We have put them at the heart of AnyCloud, because both of them matter a lot to Europe and other regions of the world, in many specific and practical ways.
Beyond an apparent layer of global uniformity enabled by cloud computing, there are many subtle differences between countries and regions that we must take into account. We are fully aware that it is a never ending process, and a fascinating one, even for a horizontal technology such as PaaS. With AnyCloud, by making deployment a truly local choice, we have a rock solid foundation to go further in the near future, for the benefit of our customers and partners around the world.
Francois Dechery
Vice President of International Business Development
CloudBees
www.cloudbees.com

Join CloudBees, Sauce Labs, and Eventbrite as we explore and celebrate the myriad ways that Jenkins and Selenium go hand in hand.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012 from 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM (PT)

Hosted at Eventbrite (map):
651 Brannan St, Suite 110
San Francisco, CA 94107

Featuring talks by Jenkins Creator Kohsuke Kawaguchi and Selenium Creator Jason Huggins, the event will give you an inside look at some recent improvements to how Jenkins and Selenium integrate together, as well as what's been going on with Huggins' show-stopping robot Bitbeam. You'll also hear a talk by John Shuping & Theo Cincotta, Senior Engineers at Eventbrite, who will show how the popular site uses uses Selenium & Jenkins in production.

This free event kicks off at 6pm with food and drinks, followed by talks from 6:30-8pm.


Please RSVP early to reserve your spot -108 people have already registered in 2 days. No worries if you can't make it though - the talks will be recorded and posted to YouTube after the event.

Ps – If you aren’t already a member of the San Francisco Selenium meetup group, check it out – the group supports a steady stream of awesome events like this one.