I am sure you know Cloudbees already, but just in case here is a short description of the services they provide : CloudBees is a cloud-based SaaS solution that provides flexible and scalable tools, from development (dev@cloud) to production (run@cloud). By nature at SonarSource we are mostly looking at development environments, i.e. dev@cloud, and this is what I am going to talk about today.

Dev@cloud aims to provide a full development infrastructure for small to medium size teams. The beauty with Cloudbees is that not only you don’t need to own and / or manage any hardware but also you don’t have to install and / or manage any of the software running on it. Cloudbees started to operate about one year ago, offering Jenkins as a service. Last July, Cloudbees added partners services to have a more comprehensive proposition: Artifactory as a repository for dependencies, Sauce Labs for tests and Sonar for Code Quality !

Check it out, in a few clicks you get comprehensive development infrastructure. There are several offers you can choose from, ranging from totally free for open source projects to high spec machine costing 5 cts per minute for builds requiring lots of power. Having Sonar available in Cloudbees will cost you about 20 USD per month for the server instance and 2 cts per minute for analysing projects. The infrastructure is highly scalable as each build start on its own slave and therefore does not compete for resources with others. We found it so good that we decided to move our entire Nemo infrastructure onto Cloudbees: instead of 36 hours elapsed, it now takes 6 hours to analyze 150 projects!

I believe that Cloudbees is a very compelling proposition for getting a development infrastructure up and running in no time. You now have no excuse to not focus on what really matters: the development of your product! I expect that many teams (and not only small ones) make a move in the coming months to this type of services, similarly to what happened in CRM with SalesForce.