CloudBees continuous cloud delivery accelerates time-to-market for web and mobile applications

With CCD, enterprises, mobile application developers and SaaS vendors have a solution to one of their most pressing problems – delivering incremental software features and updates quickly to keep up with rapidly changing markets and maintain their competitive edge. Rather than following traditional, lengthy software release cycles, software teams must deliver software in a more agile manner. CCD addresses this need by automating the development and testing processes, ensuring that software applications are always in a ready-to-deploy state.

“Our customers have made it very clear to us, time-to-market is their most pressing business challenge,” said Sacha Labourey, CEO and founder, CloudBees. “Leveraging the CloudBees Platform, Continuous Cloud Delivery provides the quickest way to deliver applications and ensure the highest levels of quality.”

Traditional non-cloud methods of delivering applications can’t keep pace with today’s fast-changing online and mobile markets. The traditional approach is plagued with many issues, such as: isolated development teams without visibility into changes being made by others; teams using different development processes, tools and systems; delays between development stages because manual intervention is required or system resources must be allocated; and application quality suffering when corners are cut on testing.

The CCD approach leverages key elements within the CloudBees PaaS to transform the application delivery process:
· Cloud-based development ensures that all developers have visibility into code changes and application status at all times, even across teams
· Scalability and elasticity ensure resources are instantly available
· Repositories are centrally accessed for the sharing of source code and version control management
· Jenkins Continuous Integration (CI) automatically incorporates code changes and processes those changes based on team-established rules
· Ready access to development, testing and staging resources eliminates friction with IT and long waits for infrastructure resources
· Continuous deployment means updates are pushed to production as soon as they are ready
· Transparent deployment ensures no application downtime when updates are pushed out; transactions in process are not disrupted

“Agile development is focused on shortening all the feedback loops in a development cycle. Some companies have reduced the feedback loop even further by deploying each new feature as soon as it is completed. This provides immediate feedback on how the code actually works in production,” said Nathan Wilson, principal research analyst, Gartner Research. “To allow continuous deployments while avoiding defects in production, combine continuous integration and continuous automated testing with DEVOps best practices to ensure that each change is fully tested before being deployed.”

CCD is another example of CloudBees’ commitment to accelerating the software development process through the use of hosted services across the entire application lifecycle. In addition to the services available within the CloudBees PaaS, CloudBees’ partner ecosystem offers an extensive set of hosted services. Developers can make use of best-of-breed application testing, performance monitoring, log management, mail and database service providers among others. With access to a comprehensive set of services, development teams spend 100 percent of their time developing applications instead of installing and maintaining tools and software.

"We use continuous delivery with CloudBees, enabling every developer to deliver incremental functionality while being accountable for his or her own code,” added Mario Cruz, co-founder and CTO, Choose Digital. “As a result, the effort of each developer is aligned to the goals of the company, and that keeps us lean, focused and fast."

“When application deployment gets as easy as it does with CloudBees, it changes the way you think about development,” said Charles Teague, CEO, Lose It!. “At other companies I’ve worked for, deployment could be a very slow process. Fixing any bug, even if it took a minute to write code, took days or sometimes weeks, so you had to be extremely careful on the production server. With Continuous Cloud Delivery that same process now takes us just a few minutes. We can address bugs and performance bottlenecks in minutes, which enable us to continuously improve the quality of the Lose It! weight loss application.”