CloudBees straddles firewall with VPN connection

Cloud startup CloudBees has launched a technology that lets customers of the developer-oriented cloud connect their sensitive on-premises resources to the company's cloud via VPN.

By building hosted OpenVPN into its infrastructure, the Java cloud has been able to launch the service which it says can assuage security concerns and make it easier to start fiddling with resources in the cloud.

This is important for the company, as it specialises in build and test management tools for Java, so developers frequently want to shuttle resources from their local development environments up into its cloud for a vigorous bout of testing using the hosted Jenkins continuous integration server, among other features.

The service is for developers that "want to move their fast IT projects to do dev, development, testing, staging in the cloud, but they need to connect to their backend resources," the company's product veep Steve Harris, tells The Reg.

"What this VPN-to-Jenkins capability allows us to do is have that customer use an open VPN-based gateway on their premises to allow those resources to connect to our hosted Jenkins [continuous integration] service in the cloud," he says.

It is available as one component of the company's "Enterprise" package, which costs $200 per month for access to the cloud along with 50GB of source code and binary storeage, unlimited parallel builds, up to 50 users, and other features.

The company has also rebranded the technology it acquired with its acquisition of FoxWeave as "Weave@Cloud Availability".

The tech is a data migration and synchronization service for web services, and is designed to do things such as sync form-submits in Google Drive to new documents in CloudantDB, or sync new contacts in Salesforce with contacts in Freshbooks.

"You can use the Weave@Cloud, the FoxWeave capabilities, to identify external databases or hosted resources and connect those to the endpoints in your cloud application," Harris says.

The CloudBees updates highlight the lengths small "as-a-service"–style technology firms need to go to in their efforts to differentiate themselves from the looming megaclouds operated by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. The irony being that CloudBees is mainly located on ... wait for it ... Amazon Web Services.

Even an as-a-service company is but a service of another service, it seems. ®