CloudBees Extends Scope of Google Cloud Alliance

At its DevOps World | Jenkins World 2019 conference, CloudBees today announced it will collaborate with Google to optimize deployments of the Jenkins and Jenkins X continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platforms on Google Anthos, a hybrid cloud computing framework based on Kubernetes that Google is now making available across multiple public cloud and on-premises IT platforms.

Google Anthos is designed to be deployed on top of not just on top of a Google infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environment, but also cloud services from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft and on-premises IT platforms from VMware and Cisco Systems.

The Google Anthos initiative extends CloudBees’ and Google’s relationship. Most recently, the two companies co-founded with others the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), an arm of the Linux Foundation that is committed to advancing adoption of Jenkins, Jenkins X, the Spinnaker continuous delivery platform developed by Netflix and Tekton, a set of tools for building pipelines in CI/CD platforms based on Kubernetes.

Partnering with CloudBees is critical for Google as it seeks to jump-start the development of applications that it hopes will be deployed on Anthos. Gartner recently published an IaaS report which noted Google had only a 4% share of the IaaS market as of the end of 2018. Anthos represents Google’s effort to leverage the inherent cross-platform capabilities of Kubernetes to dominate the next era of cloud-native computing.

At the same time, CloudBees is looking to leverage its success with Jenkins by making available Jenkins X, an open source CI/CD platform based on Kubernetes designed to support Tekton pipelines. Jenkins X presents DevOps teams with a more opinionated instance of a CI/CD platform that incorporates many of the best practices that have emerged over the last decade. A curated distribution of Jenkins X was made available by CloudBees earlier this month.

CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey said Google is starting to gain some momentum under the leadership of Thomas Kurian, a former Oracle executive who became CEO of Google Cloud late last year. CloudBees, Google and the rest of the CDF have yet to work out the relationship between Jenkins X and Spinnaker, but Labourey said over time customers should expect to see a high level of integration across both platforms.

In the meantime, the shift to developing cloud-native applications is accelerating. By making it easier to deploy a CI/CD platform in the form of Jenkins X that abstracts away much of the complexity associated with deploying Kubernetes, CloudBees is betting it will be able to thwart rivals that view this transition as an opportunity to displace the Jenkins platform, which many organizations continue to rely on to accelerate development of monolithic applications.

It’s too early to say how the battle for control over the next era of cloud-native application development will play out. However, what is for certain is the building and deploying of those applications will drive more organizations to embrace DevOps processes more broadly than ever.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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