Returning to JBoss World with CloudBees

This year, some of us ex-JBossians will be returning to JBoss World , taking place a month from now in Boston. It will be a bit of a homecoming in some ways, as I had to travel frequently to Boston during the three years I was at Red Hat. I have also been at every JBoss World since the first (in 2005) – except for last year, when I was busy getting CloudBees off the ground (April 1st is our anniversary!).

When I left Red Hat two years ago, I had nothing in mind except to do nothing, and I was highly skeptical of the cloud. In fact, when I first heard about the cloud – that is, as a bunch of machines running somewhere in the cloud – I really did not see much of a revolution there. But a couple months into my ‘temporary retirement,’ it became clear to me that the concepts behind the cloud did not just apply to servers, but could equally well apply to “applications”– and this was the real way to bring value to developers.

A year later, CloudBees was born. I wanted to focus on applications as a first-level construct and apply the cloud concepts of on-demand, scalability and pay-as-you-go to applications – not to virtual machines or servers, which make no sense to application developers. IT infrastructure is no longer a key differentiator. It’s a layer that’s well known, and which provides a good fit for VM-centric “legacy” applications, but they certainly do not provide a good foundation for deploying applications. Cloud is an opportunity to move away from IT that is customized for each and every application, the haute couture of IT, and instead define the ‘Lego blocks’ of IT. So instead of having to reinvent the wheel for every application we build, the cloud lets us leverages basic elements that enable accelerated development at lower costs.

Yet another year later, I’m really pleased to see the responses so far.

To be sure, we are still working out kinks (thank you for your ongoing feedback), but at a fundamental level, we’re achieving our raison d’être.

If you are going to be at JBoss World / Red Hat Summit, stop by booth #1011 and see what we’re all about! (BTW, you can use our discount code, RHCUSTCLB34, to get $150 off the registration.) I expect to be quite busy meeting up with my former colleagues but send me a tweet if you want to meet up.

Onward,

Sacha