I had the honor of sharing my latest cloud vision and observations at the first {FUTURE}STACK13 conference in San Francisco on October 24. Here's a quick synopsis…
The cloud comes as a wake-up call for the old ways of licensing and providing software. Our current license-based business model for software and hardware has been well-established for two decades… and yet it has only taken a few years for the cloud to threaten this model completely.
 |
| Image courtesy of deviantART |
Worldwide server revenues dropped more than 6% in the second quarter of 2013; in contrast, AWS is expected to reach nearly $4b in revenue for 2013. These stats illustrate a profound foundational change in the IT industry: the shift from a hardware and software-based industry to a services industry. In this new services economy, IT no longer requires you to acquire, install, setup and maintain assets, but instead becomes a service you consume, on-demand.
This shift profoundly impacts both IT vendors and IT buyers. Read the slides from my talk to learn more about how the cloud has already initiated the Fall of Giants.
More than three years ago, CloudBees released a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that lets developers in SMB and enterprises drastically reduce time to market and increase productivity. CloudBees PaaS takes care of the complete application lifecycle, from development, testing, and staging to production. In addition, it can establish completely secure connections to on-premise resources. By linking cloud and on-premise systems, CloudBees enables developers and IT teams to benefit from a “Fast IT” environment in the cloud, while at the same time leveraging the “Core IT” assets on-premise – the best of both worlds, à la carte.
Along these lines, we have new enhancements in three technology areas that make it simple for enterprises to adopt continuous integration, improve business agility and benefit from elastic cloud resources while securely accessing core IT assets:
VPN to Jenkins - Users of the CloudBees-hosted Jenkins service can now connect via VPN to on-premise development resources, such as source code repositories, test databases and other development artifacts. Fast IT projects can use cloud-based resources for development, testing and staging while securely accessing existing, on-premise enterprise investments.
Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) Support - Enterprises overwhelmingly use SAML-based identity and access management systems. To take advantage of cloud-based resources for Fast IT projects, they need to control access to their systems using their existing SAML investments. CloudBees now supports SAML 2.0-based authentication and authorization, which can be coupled with Role-based Access Control within the CloudBees-hosted Jenkins service.
WEAVE@cloud App-Centric Integration - CloudBees new data migration and synchronization service, WEAVE@cloud, has been extended to further simplify how RUN@cloud applications publish and subscribe to events from data and SaaS services. Events from on-premise and hosted databases and services can trigger actions in applications hosted on RUN@cloud and vice-versa. CloudBees' recent acquisition of FoxWeave established CloudBees as the first PaaS vendor to offer services for SaaS application and data integration.
With CloudBees and countless others continuously delivering improvements on the new services model and further displacing license-based infrastructure, I recommend you keep an eye on the sky -- it's about to start raining giants.
-- Sacha
*Update: The video of The Cloud and the Fall of Giants talk at {Future}Stack13 is now available here .
Sacha Labourey
Founder and CEO, CloudBees