Over the past day I’ve managed to port our CI system, including Jenkins and Nexus, to CloudBees. I’d not heard of it before, but it was highly recommended when I did a search for Hosted Jenkins. It is also free for projects with limited needs, so what the hell, I decided to give it a shot.
Aside from a slight hangup initially, everything went extremely smoothly. The hangup was that the Jenkins account took about 30 minutes before I could access it.
So what are we getting?
I’m mostly using the DEV@cloud offering, which has hosted Nexus, Jenkins, and SCM with 2GB of space. This saves me effort of keeping these things up to date, and an $80/mo Rackspace Cloud instance (2GB memory). The free version includes only Jenkins build executor, but considering the size of my team this is okay—it also comes with support for 3 users, which is fine for now. A nice touch is unlimited Git/SVN repo hosting, which counts against the 2GB of disk space. Each of these things can also be public or private, making it a nice choice for FOSS projects.
There is also a nice collection of services integrated. So-far I’ve used integrated MongoHQ hosting, which gives a free 16MB mongo instance that I can use for my automated integration tests. Which brings me to another awesome point: I was worried that my Maven build would be limited, being that I spawn up Jetty instances and connect to MongoDB during my IT phase—both work flawlessly! I’ll admit I saw skeptical and waiting for some insurmountable obstacle.
Other nice features that I plan to try out in the near future are the free SauceLabs integration (cross-browser Selenium testing in the cloud!) and Sonar integration which is $20/mo (I am really coming to like this idea of paying to not having to deal with it).
There are some other interesting services related to performance monitoring and logging that tie in with the RUN@cloud offering, but I’ll have to explore those options in greater depth later, for now I am quite happy with the DEV@cloud.
I’ve only been using it for one day, so I can’t speak to the reliability / peak slowdown. But my impression is that this is a solid offering, particular considering I know the reputation of at least two people on their team (and have worked with one on a Maven plug-in). What did I say about 2012 holding exciting things for virtualized development systems? :)