Whenever I get asked about what CloudBees do, my simple elevator pitch is about how we help our customers and end-users develop and deliver their software products to the market much faster - Accelerating Software Delivery . If there is more interest from the person or audience I'm talking to, I bring up the Developer Productivity benefits that CloudBees technology enables for R&D organizations, and how that lead to a more lean and agile way of working, with higher quality output. Our final major value proposition that I emphasize is the cloud benefits of our technology. By having the R&D teams running their development workloads through or on top of CloudBees, IT organizations are able to centralize, streamline and optimize their compute infrastructure - saving lots of money by reduced hardware footprint, energy consumption and maintenance. Given our name and the general hype around cloud, this last and third aspect is obviously something many people that don't know about CloudBees sort of assume from us despite that's not how we typically lead our positioning. It's also aligned with a very interesting and clear trend in the industry that I'm guessing most of the readers are aware of – how large centralized private and/or public clouds of infrastructure are being deployed to manage and run compute intensive workloads. With that said, in the past few weeks I've listened to an interesting series of podcasts from the team at Nebula , a company that's leveraging OpenStack and other technologies to “democratize” private cloud computing. In the last podcast episode dated April 30th , the Nebula Director of UX Tres Henry offers an interesting insight into his view of where the general cloud industry is heading. Below are some quotes I noted while listening: __
Industry is moving to a model where nobody really cares about the infrastructure elements of the cloud, it's the things and workloads that run on the cloud that matters.
From a UX perspective, higher-level representation of complex workloads in the cloud becomes important.
Drilling down and present more detailed real-time information and metrics about state of workload.
Making the infrastructure invisible – moving away from focus on lower-level API's to modelling about the actual workload.
Dealing with the constraints about the workload as it runs. Scaling up and down based on the constraints of the workload.
Taking advantage of the elasticity of the cloud such that workloads that have different requirements at different times are in phase with each other.
This kind of visionary description of the future progression that we can expect in the cloud computing industry really resonates with me, and caught my attention as being pretty much spot on to what we at CloudBees in many ways already do. Consider for example CloudBees Accelerator , our product offering that accelerates compute intensive development tasks such as software builds, tests and analysis. CloudBees Accelerator transparently distributes the workload across large centralized clouds of infrastructure, often leveraging up to many hundreds of concurrent cores for a single workload. It is able to handle and manage large numbers of static and dynamic compute resources in a centralized cloud, while taking advantage of deep understandings of the constraints of the workload when scheduling and balancing the load. Using sophisticated fine-grained representations of the inner details of the workload, CloudBees Accelerator is also able to present and report large amounts of metrics and information through consumable user interfaces, in real-time when it matters. As you can see, lots of parallels with the potential future of cloud computing! Today, it's fair to say that we don't come into office every day thinking that we work for a cloud company, but if the above direction of the cloud computing industry holds true, maybe that's about to change...