CloudBees Java PaaS Rolling Out Enterprise Cloud Features

CloudBees, the Java PaaS startup that garnered some channel attention when it enticed an ex-Oracle top executive to come over and lead product development, announced an update at this week’s Oracle JavaOne 2011, slated for a fall release. Its goal? Enhancing adoption and enterprise readiness. And how? One word: Agility.

According to the press release, much of those adoption-focused additions revolve around turnkey continuous deployment — CloudBees is hoping to entice developers to its platform with the ability to “kick off builds and regression tests, and automatic deployment if release criteria are met” at the click of a button.

The Jenkins instance in CloudBees will also get an upgrade, “including moving to the latest stable release (v. 1.409.1), support for JDK 7 and several Nectar plugins.” The new release also boasts: better support for Grails; easier application setup from development on Jenkins to deployment CloudBees services; better connectors between Jenkins, GitHub-based repositories and Jenkins; a new GUI and enhanced documentation.

As for that enterprise readiness, CloudBees announced several enhancements that improve the platform’s suitability for hosting business applications. For instance, CloudBees now supports the Java EE 6 Web Profile specification, role-based access control, an Eclipse toolkit that includes useful tools such as wizards and build/deploy commands for applications, and role-based access control.

All in all, it looks as though CloudBees is working hard at delivering on its pitch as the “only cloud company focused on servicing the complete Java application lifecycle for cloud development and deployment — without any servers, any virtual machines or any IT staff.” Those are bold claims, and it has plenty of competition.

Needless to say, we’ll be keeping an eye on CloudBees through this fall feature release — and beyond.