CloudBees bridges the gap

Enterprises increasingly recognise that the cloud lets them spin up and deliver new projects rapidly, work that many are referring to as “Fast IT.” These projects must be launched quickly, scaled up and down as needed, and then shut down quickly, depending on requirements. At the same time, enterprises are looking to keep their “Core IT” assets in-house, to leverage those key investments and protect critical data.

“To meet today’s fast-cycle business needs, companies need to unleash their ‘Fast IT’ – and they’re getting this done by leveraging the public cloud,” said Sacha Labourey, CEO and founder of CloudBees. “At the same time, they don’t want to scrap their existing ‘Core IT’ investments. Using the CloudBees platform, enterprises can get the best of both worlds: They can develop an app in the cloud, test it, stage it and run it, but they can still leverage all their existing IT investments. Enterprises need tools to help them adapt to this new level of flexibility – and this vision is guiding us in terms of the new features we’re bringing to our platform.”

The CloudBees platform enhancements cover three technology areas, making it simple for enterprises to adopt Continuous Integration, improve business agility and benefit from elastic cloud resources while securely accessing core IT assets.

• VPN to Jenkins – This new capability allows users of the CloudBees-hosted Jenkins service to connect via VPN to on-premise development resources, such as source code repositories, test databases and other development artifacts. Fast IT projects can use cloud-based resources for development, testing and staging while securely accessing existing, on-premise enterprise investments.

• Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) Support– Enterprises overwhelmingly use SAML-based identity and access management systems. To take advantage of cloud-based resources for Fast IT projects, they need to control access to their systems using their existing SAML investments. CloudBees now supports SAML 2.0 based authentication and authorisation, which can be coupled with Role-based Access Control within the CloudBees hosted Jenkins services.
• WEAVE@cloud App-Centric Integration – CloudBees new data migration and synchronisation service, WEAVE@cloud has been extended to further simplify how RUN@cloud applications publish and subscribe to events from data and SaaS services. Events from on-premise and hosted databases and services can trigger actions in applications hosted on RUN@cloud and vice-versa. CloudBees’ recent acquisition of FoxWeave established CloudBees as the first PaaS vendor to offer services for SaaS application and data integration.

These new capabilities are also delivered in an improved CloudBees user interface that helps unify the experience across the entire development-test-stage-production application lifecycle
"The CloudBees VPN to Jenkins solution helped us to connect our Jenkins builds running in the cloud to on-premise resources, like source code repositories and databases,” said David Beer, managing director, Copper Arrow Software Services, a UK-based software development company. “The secure connection was easy to set up and solves a real problem for us and for our clients who want to develop their software projects using continuous integration services on the CloudBees Platform, while accessing resources that are behind a firewall in a secure environment."