Special thanks to Spike Washburn and Jim McLoughlin for coming out to our group and talking about building and deploying JBoss applications in CloudBees.  And to those that people who braved the rain, they were fortunate to see an impressive magic show.

 

The tagline for the talk of 'From Zero to Continuous Deployment in minutes' was unbelievable true.  If you're like me and find yourself working on multiple projects throughout the year, a lot of the mundane tasks associated with these new projects revolve around the project bootstrap phase.  Setting up a new code repository, setting up a new maven repository for your custom artifacts, installing jenkins and Sonar, installing multiple dev/test/prod instances of JBoss and MySQL to support development activities.  All of this can take weeks - depending on whether or not the right resources are available.  But all of this accidental complexity is getting in the way of our ability to write code that takes your requirements and turns them into fully functional applications.

 

Spike showed us an alternative approach with CloudBees. In an one hour talk, he was able to deploy multiple new MySQL instance, a new JBoss AS 7 instance, 3 different applications, and switch between a dev and qa instance.  He even had time left to demonstrate true continuous deployment that was triggered by a git commit and a kicked off a Jenkins build that then deployed the new code base to a running JBoss AS 7 instance. 

 

Project Bootstrap will never be that same again.  Code Monkeys - start your IDEs.