Accelerate Sales Growth with PaaS - Q&A from Cloud Training Webinars

Over the last two weeks, we conducted a pair of training webinars to help our Systems Integrator partners better understand and use the CloudBees platform. There were some great questions during the webinar Q&A and I wanted to give you more detailed answers than we had time to address on the webinar.

Q: How do I transfer the ownership of a project from one team to another?

A: Our recommended approach is to create a new account dedicated to your project and to associate the members of your team to this "Project Account."

Here is a sample with a "mycompany-ecommerce" Project Account to which we will associate the user "cleclerc@cloudbees.com." Go to your Account page and follow the steps:

You will then have all your project resources, source code repositories, Jenkins builds, and RUN@cloud servers instances grouped together.

Q: How many concurrent builds can I run simultaneously on my DEV@cloud Jenkins instance?

A. There is no limit to the number of concurrent builds that can run on Jenkins instances with the Pro and Enterprise DEV@cloud subscriptions. Thanks to this, your build will not have to wait for the build of one of your colleagues to finish.

Please note that the free DEV@cloud subscription is limited to 1 simultaneous build.

Q: The majority of our clients currently host heterogeneous software development environments. Do you have any plans on extending .NET support?

A. We do not yet have plans to support Windows environments on both DEV@cloud and RUN@cloud. However, we are working on allowing customers to attach their own Jenkins executors to their DEV@cloud Jenkins controller. Thanks to this, a customer could attach a Windows or a MacOS Jenkins Executor.

Q: Do you work with several IaaS providers now?

A. CloudBees currently runs on Amazon AWS and on HP Cloud Services. That said, the cloud ecosystem is moving very fast and we could imagine that things will evolve by the end of the year 2013.

Q: Does CloudBees have any hosting partners in the EU that are not US companies?

A. CloudBees already runs in the European datacenter of Amazon AWS, based in Ireland. It is subject to European laws.

Q. Does CloudBees have an equivalent of the Amazon AWS Pricing Calculator to help me estimate the cost of my infrastructure?

A. Yes, CloudBees has two calculators, one for DEV@cloud and another for RUN@cloud:

• DEV@cloud pricing calculator

• RUN@cloud pricing calculator

Q: What does CloudBees mean by managing a server for me? Does CloudBees apply security fixes and version upgrades for me?

A. CloudBees offers two types of stacks with different levels of support:

• "curated stacks" (currently Tomcat and JBoss) are maintained and fully supported by CloudBees. These stacks follow a very strict Q&A process and come with tooling for monitoring and management.

• "community stacks" (e.g. Play2!, Glassfish...) are maintained by the community. Although CloudBees engineers are often contributing to these stacks, they often don't implement the same monitoring and management features nor have the same Q&A process as our curated stacks have. We cannot ensure the same support for these stacks.

With regard to these differences, CloudBees applies security fixes and upgrades to the "curated stacks" in a transparent manner for the customer. Minor upgrades will be applied to the new deployments, while emergency fixes (security vulnerabilities, etc.) will be applied on live applications if needed. For example, CloudBees patched the live servers of its customers for the "Leap Second Bug."

On the other side, CloudBees does not apply "transparent" maintenance on "community stacks."

For both curated and community stacks, CloudBees manages the underlying operating system (Linux), network and storage and applies fixes to them when needed.

Q: When you say you manage my application, do you restart it when it the JVM dies?

A. Yes, CloudBees restarts the process of an instance if it dies. This applies for Java stacks as well as for non-Java stacks.

We hope this information is helpful to you.

• Cyrille

Cyrille Le Clerc is an elite architect at CloudBees. He has more than 12 years of experience with Java technologies. He came to CloudBees from Xebia, where he was CTO and architect. Cyrille was an early adopter of the “You Build It, You Run It” model that he put in place for a number of high-volume websites. He naturally embraced the DevOps culture, as well as cloud computing. He has implemented both for his customers. Cyrille is very active in the Java community as the creator of the embedded-jmxtrans open source project and as a speaker at conferences.