Today, I’m happy to announce that InfraDNA is joining forces with CloudBees (there’s also a press release that’s far better written than my post.)
In the past 6 months, I think InfraDNA made a lot of progress. Hudson kept getting better, which in turn resulted in a continued growth of the adoption. We are also working with a number of vendors, such as CollabNet and Sauce Labs, to improve Hudson to work better with their products. Our support subscription business has grown substantially, and the forecast is looking even better. So I started feeling that we can grow faster, and as much as I enjoyed doing the business side, I needed to focus more on the engineering side. Or put another way, I felt that Hudson is big enough that it supports a bigger organization than a 2-men shop that is InfraDNA.
That’s where CloudBees come into picture. I’ve been in touch with them almost from the get-go, and I respected what they’ve done. As I wrote in my blog when I set out to start InfraDNA this April, I see Hudson more and more as a foundation of doing all kind of development things server side. I also see that the elasticity of the computing resources enabled by Cloud and virtualizations as a game-changing shift in CI (see my JavaOne 2009 presentation on this very topic.) CloudBees share these visions. On top of that, Sacha and Bob together bring in a lot of experience of doing a start up, surrounded by a number of high-caliber technical folks.
The combined companies have a lot to bring to the table. InfraDNA’s Certified Hudson CI (or ICHCI), our supported commercial value-add distribution of Hudson, will be renamed to something much easier to pronounce — Nectar! But otherwise it’ll follow through the same trajectory we set out at InfraDNA. It is aimed at more serious users of Hudson, who needs advanced features, manageability, etc.
Those advanced features we develop for Nectar will be also available in CloudBee’s Hudson-as-a-Service (HaaS), making it even more attractive for another set of audience, who would value the convenience of a hosted service (as opposed to doing everything by yourself.) In addition, the challenges large Hudson deployments face are naturally the kind of problems CloudBees face in providing HaaS. So those experiences cross-pollinate well.
So today marks a closure of one chapter of my life, and it also marks a beginning of another one. I also wanted to take this opportunities to thank all Hudson users and InfraDNA customers for making my life more interesting — I wouldn’t have been here without you! — and I’m looking forward to continue working with you guys.