Verizon Cloud Adds CloudBees PaaS

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The revamped Verizon Cloud has added a platform-as-a-service to its Verizon Cloud Compute and Cloud Storage services. Its CloudBees PaaS is noted for its depth of Java development services and middleware, and for its ability to deploy applications to different environments.

Verizon announced at Interop in New York October 3 that it was remaking its basic cloud offering to become more competitive in compute and storage services. The revamped offerings became available alongside its existing Verizon Terremark enterprise services, both a hosted service and a self-service cloud.

Though still in beta, the Verizon Cloud is offered from seven datacenters that have been re-equipped with SeaMicro hardware. The Verizon centers boast of green operating practices. The SeaMicro servers are three times as dense as their predecessor servers and use less electricity, according to Verizon CTO John Considine. The abilities both to operate efficiently and to host the development of next-generation applications are becoming more important competitive factors in cloud services. VMware, a newcomer to public cloud services, offers Cloud Foundry PaaS.

CloudBees was founded in 2010 in Woburn, Mass., by the former CTO of JBoss, Sacha Labourey, who served several years as CTO of middleware at Red Hat after Red Hat acquired the open source firm. CloudBees has been available since launch to run on Amazon Web Services, OpenStack clouds (including HP's), and on VMware's Cloud Foundry.

Applications developed on CloudBees may be deployed to any of these environments or back into the enterprise, if their owners prefer. Verizon, in selecting CloudBees, risks being the development site of applications that will end up running in some other cloud. But hybrid cloud operations appeal to many enterprise developers, particularly the ability to deploy some applications in a public cloud and some back behind the enterprise firewall, a practice that CloudBees supports.

[Want to learn more about how Microsoft's Azure cloud is expanding its PaaS options? See Engine Yard PaaS Expands To Microsoft Azure.]

"We are working with best-in-class enterprise technology companies to bring additional value to our core availability, performance, and security," said Considine, in making the announcement on February 19.

CloudBees has taken a more direct DevOps approach to the marketplace than earlier PaaS providers. Its platform includes support for deployment via open-source Jenkins, geared to provide "continuous delivery" of freshly developed code to rapidly evolving production applications. CloudBees includes a Jenkins Operations Center. CloudBees can also establish update centers with designated masters in charge of pushing code into production.

Both CloudBees and Apprenda, another PaaS software maker, have provided versions of their platform designed to run on the enterprise premises as opposed to only being available through a public cloud service.

The arrival of CloudBees Java platform on Verizon is timely because Verizon and Oracle have announced they soon will make both the Oracle database and Oracle Fusion middleware available on Verizon Compute Cloud. Fusion is middleware for running Java applications. Oracle is the owner of Java since its acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

"This deal represents two market leaders coming together to create a compelling cloud offering," said Oracle President Mark Hurd on January 10 in making that announcement. No launch date has been announced. Once available, it too will be a beta service.

Can the trendy tech strategy of DevOps really bring peace between developers and IT operations -- and deliver faster, more reliable app creation and delivery? Also in the DevOps Challenge issue of InformationWeek: Execs charting digital business strategies can't afford to take Internet connectivity for granted.