Professional Services Added to CloudBees PaaS

CloudBees has a popular platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and while this technology makes it easier to build, modify and host applications, it is still not 100 percent automatic. PaaS is a service, but not always a managed service or one supported by professional services.

The latter issue is now tackled by a new deal between professional services provider Open Software Integrators, LLC (OSI) and CloudBees.

The deal is largely aimed at existing CloudBees’ customers who can add professional services, but is also useful for new customers who could get help exploiting a new PaaS service.

The open source-based OSI focuses on cloud solutions and big data.

In fact, OSI and CloudBee’s execs go back a ways. “In this partnership, I am reunited with my friend and former JBoss colleague Sacha Labourey. Needless to say, Sacha is doing magnificent work at CloudBees. PaaS is one of the most important trends in computing today. I look forward to our continued success in helping customers accelerate their development and deployment life cycle by leveraging the powerful Git and Jenkins integration CloudBees offers,” said OSI president, Andrew C. Oliver.

CloudBees’ Boss Labourey returned the compliment: “Andrew's credentials are impeccable. He was a key contributor to the JBoss project, thus understands the open source community well. The combination of the CloudBees PaaS and Open Software Integrators expertise is a sure win for our mutual customers.”

The CloudBees’ Story

CloudBees was the brainchild of the aforementioned Sacha Labourey, who was previously CTO of JBoss. Labourey started CloudBees in 2010 to drive the PaaS market forward.

The CloudBees’ PaaS is Java-based and is designed to support fast development that also allows for frequent iterations.

The PaaS Exam

There are three main cloud services layers. At the bottom of the stack is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) which is raw computing infrastructure, usually servers and associated network that one accesses over the Internet.

PaaS is a full layer above and provides a development platform for writing, then running applications. Above that is Software as a Service (SaaS), which is really just packaged software deployed in the cloud.

This, of course, is all blurring. Some PaaSes are fully decoupled from IaaS, and some PaaSes are intensely coupled with IaaS. That means some IaaS offering are becoming more like a PaaS and vice versa.