CloudBees, the software delivery platform provider, is unveiling two major updates to the CloudBees environment, featuring a new cloud native DevSecOps platform and significant performance and scalability improvements for Jenkins—the most widely used CI/CD software, globally—within CloudBees CI, a fully featured cloud native capability for continuous integration (CI).
CloudBees’ platform release responds to the innate complexities associated with the rush toward cloud native application development. According to Sacha Labourey, chief strategy officer and co-founder of CloudBees, the drivers boil down to two main components:
“As organizations develop cloud native applications, there is a desire to have something [to do application development] that's very specific for cloud,” he said. “[It] is also the fact that organizations increasingly want to consume SaaS and not software.”
Engineered to support DevOps, the CloudBees platform enables enterprises to simplify and integrate complex technology and tools throughout the DevOps toolchain, invoking a seamless cloud journey from code development to deployment, according to the vendor. The proliferation of DevOps tools and products means that integration among these technologies is critical for business success.
“Since our market is really for enterprises, first and foremost. Because the innovation in the DevOps market is booming, you have lots of new solutions, new products constantly hitting the market—being able to embrace the diversity and include it as part of our flow is very important,” Labourey explained.
The CloudBees platform operates on four key tenets that guide its success, which include:
- Enhance the developer experience through reduced cognitive load and nearly invisible DevOps processes with concepts including automations, blocks, and golden paths.
- Maintain an open and extensible platform through tool orchestration flexibility that meets teams in their existing tech stacks—starting with Jenkins.
- Operate from a self-service model that encourages customizability and autonomy for development teams.
- Centralize security and compliance via out-of-the-box workflow templates with built-in security, sensitive information abstraction in the pipeline, baked-in, automated DevSecOps, and continuous compliance.
“A lot of our customers were asking, ‘How can I best do this [app development] and how can I best develop for cloud native?’” said Labourey. “The next generation CloudBees is that new SaaS platform [that’s] going to deliver increased integration between those two worlds—between the Jenkins world and the SaaS platform.”
On top of the CloudBees platform release, the company is debuting extensive improvements to performance and scalability for Jenkins within CloudBees CI (an enterprise version of Jenkins). The updates from CloudBees bring about high availability and horizontal scalability for Jenkins, targeting the CI/CD scaling bottlenecks encountered by administrators and developers.
“If you are a Jenkins user, the HA solution is really a once-in-a-decade type of announcement,” said Labourey. “The feature that we're releasing has been asked for a very, very long time; it's very complicated to deliver. We've invested lots of resources for a very long time to get there. So, I think a lot of organizations are going to be extremely pleased with that.”
Additionally, the updates to CloudBees CI forward significant performance improvements, made available by the following features:
- Workspace Caching for improving Jenkins performance via accelerated building
- CloudBees Pipeline Explorer for simpler and faster AI-powered debugging
- Build Storm Prevention for baselining repositories without causing build storms, i.e., gridlock on startup
These CloudBees CI updates will be available globally on September 20, 2023, to CloudBees commercial customers. The CloudBees platform will be available on November 1, 2023.
To learn more about CloudBees’ latest updates, please visit https://www.cloudbees.com/.