My Experience Developing Applications in the Cloud

There's a lot of buzz about deploying applications in the cloud, but what about developing applications in the cloud? In my opinion that's the next level of cloud adaptation.

I recently got a FOSS (free and open source) account on CloudBees.com for my open source Qualitas project. I'm very impressed with what it can do for you. Read below to know all the details.

Developing in the cloud

Imagine you start a new project. You have to setup a new VM and install a bunch of tools like: SCM (DSCM of course!), CI server, source code quality tools (Sonar-like of course), Maven repository, deployment environment (database, web server), not to mention monitoring and profiling tools. I almost forgot, you have to backup this VM...

I'm sure you all agree with me: quite a few things to do.

Now imagine all these things are provided to you as services. With just a few clicks you configure all these elements. Further these elements work seamlessly: a developer pushes a change to master repo, CI server detects change, builds the project, publishes artifacts to your Maven repo, publishes quality reports to Sonar, and finally deploys your application. All in the cloud.

CloudBees.com

So as I already wrote I got a FOSS account on CloudBees.com. Just take a look what services are provided:

• DEV@cloud (includes SCM, Maven repositories, Jenkins with tons of plugins, etc.)
• RUN@cloud
• Sauce Labs OnDemand
• MySQL Database
• JFrog
• New Relic
• Sonar
• Cloudant CouchDB
• MongoHQ
• XWiki
• Codesion
• Papertrail
• SendGrid
• Websolr
• AppDynamics

Qualitas

For Qualitas I'm using Maven repository and Jenkins CI server. I already have my Git repository on Google Code and I decided not to move it. You can see status of Qualitas modules here: https://qualitas.ci.cloudbees.com/job/Qualitas/modules (yes, I've installed Chuck Norris Programmer Plugin). Also, you can access recent snapshots of Qualitas artefacts from my snapshot repo here: http://repository-qualitas.forge.cloudbees.com/snapshot/. Small ad: you may be interested in my qualitas-utils-* (zip, xslt, dom) projects. I find them pretty useful and they are not (to my best knowledge) covered by any Apache Commons projects.