CloudBees, Inc., the enterprise Platform as a Service (PaaS) innovation leader, today announced that Service-Flow, a provider of ready-to-use online IT integration services for connecting IT service management (ITSM) tools, developed and deployed a new ITSM integration service (application) from the ground up on the CloudBees Platform in just three months, reducing estimated development time by 50 per cent.

Prior to selecting a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution, Service-Flow considered utilising an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)-only solution. However, the company quickly realised that even though IaaS is cloud-based, the development team would still need to perform all of the infrastructure configuration and maintenance - such as developing automation scripts, building server clusters, installing and configuring development and runtime software - which would be very time consuming. With customers waiting for the new service to be available, Service-Flow decided PaaS was the best option for fast, maintenance-free development and production deployment.

After exploring several PaaS offerings, Service-Flow chose the CloudBees Platform for its support for rapid application development and frequent incremental updates; built-in ability to manage and control all development lifecycle processes via  Jenkins Continuous Integration (CI); integrated support for document database MongoDB; exceptional reliability; and regional data storage facility within the jurisdiction of the European Union.

Utilising the continuous delivery capability of the CloudBees Platform, Service-Flow is able to deploy software upgrades to the new service without experiencing any downtime. From a service maintenance and availability standpoint, this is vital to enable the company to meet its 99.999 per cent availability target, while delivering new service features to customers as soon as they are ready.

“We evaluated several PaaS providers, but unlike CloudBees, they were either not ready for production use or relied on a hosting provider that we did not want to rely on,” said Kai Virkki, Chief Architect, Service-Flow. “CloudBees also offered an ecosystem for connecting to other services, so we were able to continue using MongoDB as well as other services we rely on. Using CloudBees, we are able to concentrate on development; everything else is taken care of by the platform.”

Service-Flow engineers began developing the new service with CloudBees DEV@cloud, a set of cloud-based development services built around Jenkins CI. The team was able to quickly set up basic Jenkins processes for build, documentation, testing, packaging, static analysis and more. Subsequently, the team deployed the prototype to production using CloudBees RUN@cloud, a set of production runtime services also offered by the CloudBees Platform.

“The CloudBees Platform makes it simple for businesses to rapidly meet the new application and service needs of their customers,” said Sacha Labourey, CEO, CloudBees. “Developers can rapidly create new applications the same way they are familiar with, but then easily deploy and maintain their applications in the cloud without incurring the overhead of any ongoing IT maintenance activities.”

In addition to DEV@cloud, RUN@cloud and MongoDB the Service-Flow team used three additional CloudBees Ecosystem services including Papertrail for log aggregation and monitoring, New Relic for application performance management and Sonar for code quality checks.