Java cloud fluffer lands Hudson build brain

November 10, 2010 Off By David
Object Storage
Grazed from The Register.  Author: Gavin Clarke.

Start-up CloudBees has bought the brains behind the Hudson open-source continuous build system, as part of its effort to fluff Java development in the clouds.

CloudBees has bought InfraDNA – a start-up providing software support and services for Hudson – along with InfraDNA’s founder and Hudson creator Kohsuke Kawaguchi. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The company has been after Kawaguchi since February – before CloudBees launched. It believes Kawaguchi is an "amazing talent" and sees Hudson as a core cloud offering for the development and the QA section of the application-lifecycle-management chain.

CloudBees founder and former JBoss chief technology officer Sacha Labourey said in a statement that having Kawaguchi on board and taking ownership of InfraDNA is critical to CloudBees’ vision for "the first, cloud-agnostic" Java platform-as-a-service. CloudBees will expand its Java application-lifecycle management cloud DEV@cloud with other open source projects and partners in the coming months, Labourey said.

Hudson is the most widely-used continues integration platform, according to CloudBees, with more than 25,000 company customers and 290 contributors since Kawaguchi created the system in 2004. InfraDNA started life in April this year.

The deal not only gives CloudBees the main behind the system but also foot in the door of major organizations using InfraDNA and Hudson. InfraDNA’s customers include Digg, Cisco, Sandia National Labs, and Lawrence Livermore National Labs.

InfraDNA’s implementation of Hudson has been reframed Nectar 1.0, with support added for VMware Virtual Machine auto configuration and deployment. Nectar is available as part of DEV@cloud.