BuildHive

Back in 2011, in the early days of CloudBees, Kohsuke Kawaguchi (creator of the Jenkins project and now CTO of CloudBees) was on a Christmas break. Clearly he was bored, as he came back fresh in January and announced that he had built a new multi-tenant CI for GitHub service: BuildHive. This was a simple-to-use service that people would log in to via their GitHub account, and tell it which repos it should build. Buildhive would automatically detect the type of project (e.g., Maven, Gradle and more) and run a default build for you. Also, it would build all pull requests and add comments about the build passing or failing as a comment on the pull request (this was before the GitHub status APIs enhancements). This was all great stuff and made use of Jenkins at the backend in a novel multi-tenanted way that was easy for us to host.

Unfortunately, the impressive experiment that was BuildHive, must come to an end. BuildHive wasn't heavily used in the later years, so we decided, in light of recent security announcements, to retire it. If you access it, it will give you some details on how you can get your settings back if you need them (given there was no build config, there isn't anything that isn't in your own repo). BuildHive gave a glimpse to how simple and easy things could be and we are using that inspiration in some new things we are working on.

Also, I am not sure what Kohsuke will get up to at Christmas, but it will be interesting I am sure.

Take a look here if you are interested in the CloudBees Jenkins Platform to host your own.