CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey

The goal is to make it easy for developers to develop what they want using CloudBees — taking advantage of its Jenkins-based continuous integration capabilities –  to deploy what they build where they want.

CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey said his company focuses on the whole application life cycle, not just development, not just deployment. In October, the company announced a similar deal that lets its users deploy on Google App Engine.

“If you’re a GAE user you can subscribe to our services… it’ s not that we’re moving to Cloud Foundry as a company, it’s just that customers have freedom of choice. If you prefer GAE or Cloud Foundry to us for deployment, that’s fine,” he said.

CloudBees users wanting to deploy to Cloud foundry can sign up here. 

Here’s the thing about PaaS: Many developers love them because of the freedom and flexibility they offer when it comes to actual development. Moves like this one mean that deployment options for their finished code (if there is such a thing) are opening up as well.

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Continuous integration of changes to software code becomes more critical as dev teams get bigger and more dispersed. Jenkins is an open-source tool that pulls in all those changes, centralizes them, and goes through changes continuously to verify code quality. The goal is to make both the development and quality assurance (QA) of code faster and more efficient — with fewer round trips.

Towards that end, Google is pointing GAE developers to Cloudbee’s Jenkins implementation. (Cloudbees offers a Java-specific Platform as a Service (PaaS).)

What tools like Jenkins do is replace chaos, said Ryan Campbell, software developer at Cloudbees. “Any time someone on the team changes something, Jenkins will check it out, test it and then email the developers if they’ve broken anything. Now [with] the App Engine integration, if the tests look good it will automatically deploy the code in GAE — probably in a test environment for your QA team to look at.”

According to the Google App Engine blog:

Jenkins will monitor your projects’ source code for any changes, run the necessary builds and tests, and notify your team of any problems – or automatically deploy the application to Google App Engine if everything looks good. This process helps to prevent the deployment of broken code, and gives everyone a central record of what changes went into each deployment.

Developers can sign up at appengine.cloudbees.com using their GAE account and can continue using whatever source code service — GitHub, Cloudbees’ own Git and SVN servers as needed, according to the blog.

Jenkins competes with Hudson in open-source continuous integration. Other CI competitors include Atlassian’s Bamboo and JetBrains’ TeamCity.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Leszek Glasner

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The new Heroku Enterprise for Java supports the latest Java Development Kits (JDKs), adds native support for the popular Eclipse integrated development environment and adds enterprise support that includes guaranteed Service Level Agreements (SLAs.)

It won’t be alone in this Java PaaS fray. Red Hat — which owns the JBoss Java middleware franchise — is making a big Java PaaS play with Openshift.  Cloudbees is a Java PaaS and even Microsoft Azure supports Java.

Heroku which started out 5 years ago as a Ruby-focused PaaS, is popular among Web developers designing customer- facing apps. It has since added other languages – including for some Java support — over the years. What’s happening here, however is a major endorsement of the full Java ecosystem which is key in enterprise accounts where Salesforce.com’s CRM software as a service (SaaS)  offering is popular.

The importance of embracing Java

“We looked at Java and saw what you need to deploy Java web apps — Tomcat, SQL databases– you always need some sort of caching layer for session management and all those pieces take a lot of work to put together even with the modern technologies available. Heroku Enterprise for Java provides this all out of the box — the full Java stack provisioned for the enterprise cloud app that you would normally deploy on premise,” Oren Teich COO of Heroku told me recently.

Heroku will charge customers $1,000 per production application per month. “You pay one price for the whole set up, the production app, the sandbox and development environment,” Jesper Joergensen, senior director of product for Heroku said in a recent interview

Since Salesforce bought Heroku in January 2010 for $212 million, developers both inside and outside of big businesses —  have used these platforms like it to build and test applications. But their corporate masters are less enthused about putting production corporate applications on these platforms. That’s something Salesforce.com, Red Hat, Microsoft (with Azure) and others are trying to change.

Al Hilwa, IDC program director for application development  said Salesforce is doing a lot with this new “Winter” release of its platform — broadening it out to include essential enterprise-class services including s file storage and identity management. Bringing 5-year-old Heroku more into the fold is part of that effort.

The company is also accommodating touch devices with its HTML5 Salesforce Touch framework. “Finally, we are seeing [Salesforce.com] bolster the Java capabilities to support real Java workloads. This is a crucial point for Heroku to run a larger mix of enterprise Java workloads, namely existing enterprise Java applications,” he said.

Salesforce’s two PaaS problem

One nagging issue for the company is that it’s fielding two PaaSes – Force.com which supports the company’s proprietary APEX language and the polyglot Heroku. The expectation is that it will bring those offerings together over time. For now, developers will be able to use Force.com’s new Canvas tool to integrate third-party applications into that environment.  With Canvas “you can now write Ruby or Java apps that use Force.com metadata and context,” Hilwa said.

Another issue: Heroku now runs only on Amazon infrastructure. As big and powerful as that platform is, it’s been known to go down and take customers — including Heroku and Netflix — with it.  Other, smaller PaaSes like Appfog, preach a multi-cloud strategy for that reason. Krishnan Subramanian, principal analyst with Rishidot, said Heroku needs to follow suit. “I’ve been pushing them a long time on this [Amazon Web Services] thing,” he said. In his view, Heroku needs to stay on Amazon but also move to other infrastructure including Salesforce.com infrastructure.

A few months ago Heroku’s then-CEO Byron Sebastian told me that Heroku is always evaluating options and will do what’s best for customers. Sebastian left in August, but Teich reiterated his message, saying Heroku will have more to say on this topic in a few months.

“You don’t come to Heroku because you want Amazon … We firmly believe uptime is critical and irrespective of the underlying infrastructure you need to know that we will be accountable for our uptime,” Teich said.

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According to co-founder Alex Loddengaard, Levy began building MemCachier as a side project in mid-2011, and he hosted a private beta version in the Heroku add-on market so a friend could easily access the service. The team at Heroku saw the service, liked it and encouraged Levy to pursue it for real. Levy, who’s still in the middle of getting a Ph.D. from Stanford, called Loddengaard (who taught Levy while a teaching assistant at the University of Washington) and fellow Stanford Ph.D. candidate David Terei for help, and MemCachier launched in April 2012.

Alex Loddengaard

Landing Loddengaard wasn’t too tough. He had quit his job at software-development firm Atlassian, after beginning his career at Google and then following his boss Christophe Bisciglia to Hadoop pioneer Cloudera, where Loddengaard was a pre-funding employee. (MemCachier, by the way, now shares office space with Bisciglia’s new company, WibiData, in the former Atlassian headquarters.) He was living off his savings, had “built a bunch of stupid web apps that you never heard of” and was trying to figure out what to do next, he told me. And then Levy called.

Memcached, and MemCachier, are everywhere

Memcached is a popular open-source key-value system that speeds up web applications by caching certain data in the memory of distributed systems rather than on disk in the database itself. Facebook is widely cited as the largest user for the hundreds of terabytes it’s now storing in memcached, but, Loddengaard said, “Every company that needs to scale uses memcached.”

Aside from the core open source version, developers might choose the Couchbase’s eponymous NoSQL database (into which the popular memcached implementation Membase Server has been integrated) or its hosted Membase service called Memcache, which is available on Heroku. Another hosted option is AWS’s ElastiCache, a membased-compliant service available to developers building web applications on the Amazon EC2 cloud.

Since starting off on Heroku, MemCachier has already expanded to the AppHarbor and Cloud Control platforms, but Wednesday’s expansion represents  the company’s first real introduction to the public, Loddengaard said. Now, MemCachier is also available on AppFog, CloudBees and DotCloud — three popular PaaS offerings — as well as Amazon EC2.

Growing isn’t always easy

Moving to Amazon’s cloud, in particular, also meant a change in pricing to reflect a different class of user (e.g., AWS mega-user Netflix) than most PaaS offerings attract. Whereas MemCachier’s options on Heroku range from 100MB to 10GB in size, Amazon users can get up to a 100GB instance. Loddengaard said most Amazon EC2 users use more than a gigabyte of RAM for memcached, and ElastiCache actually starts out at 1.3GB.

MemCachier’s architecture, simplified.

Loddengaard acknowledges that trying to woo developers away from ElastiCache service on Amazon’s own platform won’t necessarily be easy, but he thinks the difference in approach between the two services favors MemCachier for a particular class of developers — those who don’t want to manage their infrastructure too closely. Whereas ElastiCache still requires users to manage their instances, as is the norm with Amazon’s lower-level infrastructure-as-a-service platform, MemCachier is about “no operations whatsoever,” he said. “Developers shouldn’t spend any time operating servers over developing software.”

That mindset has proven effective so far. Thanks to word of mouth alone, the bootstrapped MemCachier has been growing steadily in terms of revenue and users, now claiming more than 1,500 developers, but its broader footprint and some proactive marketing should mean sharp upticks in both areas. However, a jump in users — especially the larger ones that might come from Amazon EC2 — will probably require MemCachier to grow beyond its current three-person team. Of course, there are worse problems to have.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user optimarc.

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Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller

Among platform as a service vendors, the race is on to embrace as many programming languages as possible. Microsoft Azure, VMware’s Cloud Foundry and Saleforce.com’s Heroku all proudly claim language (and framework) agnosticism.

But that isn’t necessarily a good thing, argues Sinclair Schuller, CEO of Apprenda, a PaaS vendor that has taken a distinctly different approach. Clifton Park, N.Y.-based Apprenda has chosen to fully embrace — and exploit — the Microsoft-centric .NET world, not the rest of the programming universe. Boiled down, his view is that any PaaS that professes to be a jack of all trades is truly a master of none. He said:

“On the surface, it sounds utopian to say one platform covers everything. But we find it doesn’t work. If you’re trying to bridge lots of stacks with CloudFoundry or whatever, you have to focus on the common value across all of them and let’s face it, Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, are all very different from each other.”

Apprenda has some big-name customers, including Diebold and Honeywell, building private PaaSes with its tool. “What typically happens is when a customer goes to implement a PaaS, as soon as their different [in-house] stacks deviate, there’s a problem. If 50 percent of their apps are .NET, a specialized .NET PaaS can exploit those apps fully while a multi-language PaaS cannot,” said Schuller.

While Apprenda is fighting the crowd, it’s not totally alone. Cloudbees proudly declares its focus on Java/JVM-based applications.

A Java-focused PaaS will better suit a customer’s native Java applications and features, said Cloudbee’s CEO Sacha Labourey via email.  And then there’s the service component of the PaaS. Labourey wrote:

“By using a PaaS, you are not just outsourcing the entire management and monitoring of your stack to a third-party provider, this vendor also becomes your place to go whenever you need help in understanding what’s going wrong with your application, why your transactions are failing, why some strange exceptions are showing-up, etc.”

To be credible, the PaaS vendor needs deep expertise in that customer’s preferred language and framework — a PHP or .NET expert won’t be much help troubleshooting a Java issue.  ”Today, I know of very few companies that have the depth to help customers understand very hard problems, on all possible languages. The bottom line is that a number of polyglot PaaS solutions out there are more akin to dignified generic hosting solution than a real ally through the ups and downs of your application lifecycle, ” Labourey added.

Apprenda’s Schuller probably couldn’t agree more. He said his customers — like most businesses — run a ton of Windows applications. Apprenda’s appeal to them is that it can put those on-premises applications into the SaaS realm because of its Windows DNA.

If you forced him to choose a second language to support, it would probably be Java, he acknowledged. “But our goal is to focus on Microsoft and Azure and just be really great at that.”

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Jian Awe

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Many companies would like to give their developers a PaaS option but are hesitant to go all-in with the public cloud. Just a few PaaSes, like VMware’s Cloud Foundry, offer that sort of hybrid cloud deployment choice.

CloudBees’ new AnyCloud service supports JVM-based languages and frameworks like Jruby, Groovy, Scala et al. while other PaaSes stress broader multi-language support.

Steve Harris, SVP of new products for the Woburn, Mass.-based company said flexible deployment is a major benefit for many companies that need to keep their options open. “Many enterprises have existing investments in infrastructure and local resources they need to take advantage of. They can also opportunistically put stuff on the public cloud,” he said.

CloudBees provides the company with what Harris called a fully serviced platform. “We deliver the platform as a service whether it runs on public cloud, datacenter or hosted data center — you do not install anything. We architected it in a way where you identify the resources in your data center or hosted provider but you use us to deploy and manage it,” he said.

CloudBees competes not only with other PaaSes, like Red Hat’s Java-focused OpenShift and the aforementioned Cloud Foundry, but also with traditional Java-based middleware from Oracle and other companies, Harris said.

The CloudBees AnyCloud PaaS is available in North America and Europe. The two-year-old company, backed by VCs Matrix Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners, was founded by Sacha Labourey, former CTO of JBoss, which is now owned by Red Hat.

While most of the PaaS players continue their arms race by adding more language support, CloudBees is pushing cloud deployment options, which could make it a power in the still-vibrant Java development world.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Joost J. Bakker IJmuiden.

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There is definitely more interest in PaaS by developers who don’t want to worry about hardware and software infrastructure — the scaffolding of development. They want to focus on their key concern: developing and deploying applications.

Engine Yard started out as a Ruby-oriented PaaS but added support for other languages including PHP via its acquisition of Orchestra last August.  In November, the company plugged the popular Node.js server-side framework into its PaaS as well.

The demand for PaaSes may be growing but so is the number of contenders for that business. Engine Yard competes with multi-language PaaS from AppFog and Heroku, now part of Salesforce.com and VMware’s Cloud Foundry.  (Some other PaaS players still concentrate on supporting one language well — as Cloudbees does with Java.)

Mike Piech, VP of product management and marketing, for Engine Yard, said there’s plenty of business to go around as more companies, and different types of companies, move workloads to PaaS. “If you think of the value of PaaS, you’re offloading everything except the app itself — the load balancing, the application servers, the web infrastructure to someone else so you can focus on innovation and time to market — that’s valuable to many types of companies,” he said.

Early traction came mostly from Web 2.0 companies but now Piech said enterprises of all kinds are hiring developers to work on their behalf using PaaS infrastructure.

He said there might be a shake out in the segment but said that will affect lower-end, less mature options. “We’ve been in the business six years, through a couple of generations of PaaS. We’ve built the expertise and our clients have grown up with us,” he said.

While industry giants VMware and Salesforce.com have built (or bought) PaaS power, other huge contenders include Microsoft with its Windows Azure service. Given all that consolidation, it will be interesting to see how smaller, independent players like Engine Yard will fare going forward.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user dandeluca

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