The open source automation server Jenkins is a valuable tool for automating the application lifecycle. It allows developers to deliver better software faster by continuously and automatically deploying new features in an application.

The challenge for enterprises is Jenkins can be cumbersome and time-consuming to install and deploy across an organization. CloudBees Inc.’s new Jenkins Platform — Private SaaS Edition alleviates that burden, said Dan Juengst, senior director of product marketing at CloudBees.

In the new edition, CloudBees has added advanced features that make Jenkins suitable for the enterprise, such as privacy, role-based access control, management and scalability, he said.

“We’re taking the requirements enterprises have and adding them to the cool innovation that comes from Jenkens,” Juengst said. “Our goal is to allow people to leverage Jenkins in their IT organizations to move to continuous delivery and to automate the application delivery processes.”

Brian Gracely, lead cloud analyst at Wikibon, agreed that CloudBees’ private software-as-a-service (SaaS) edition can help enterprises with their Jenkins deployments.

“Jenkins is difficult for companies to setup and maintain, so being able to let someone else manage it as a SaaS or managed SaaS eliminates a bottleneck for application development teams,” he said

Enterprises can run the private SaaS edition on their own private cloud or use dedicated Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources via a virtual private cloud connection.

Gracely said the new features correspond with two trends he sees occurring: companies feeling more comfortable using external “registry” systems to store their code (e.g. GitHub, DockerHub) and companies wanting a private version of those registries for security and auditing purposes.

CloudBees Jenkins Platform — Private SaaS Edition claims the following benefits:

• Cloud-native deployment on Amazon AWS and OpenStack provides elasticity for scaling resources up and down as needed;

• The ability to deploy Jenkins with Docker and manage deployments with Mesos;

• Instant start-up of new projects;

• Automatic failover, which allows organizations to spin up new Jenkins resources automatically should deployment unexpectedly fail;

• The ability to share resources across Jenkins deployments; and

• Built-in analytics, which provide visibility into how teams and the Jenkins infrastructure are performing across the enterprise.

The Cloudbees platform gives enterprises software-development capabilities that “frankly were being done by the unicorns—the Netflix-es and the Etsy-es and the Amazons,” Juengst said. Enterprises are “very interested in [Jenkins], but they also want it in a secure and stable fashion.”

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