Originally reported by Help Net Security. Original announcement date: August 2019.
Overview
CloudBees, a leading enterprise DevOps platform vendor, and Google Cloud announced a strategic collaboration to deliver a modern DevOps platform built on open-source technologies and powered by Google Cloud’s Anthos. The partnership targets organizations running workloads across hybrid and public cloud environments, helping them accelerate application delivery without abandoning existing on-premises infrastructure.
What Each Company Brings to the Partnership
CloudBees
CloudBees builds Jenkins-based continuous delivery solutions designed for enterprise scale. Its platform is positioned around three pillars: security, open toolchain support, and scalability across hybrid computing environments. CloudBees has been one of the most active commercial contributors to both the Jenkins and Jenkins X open-source projects.
Google Cloud and Anthos
Google Cloud’s Anthos is a hybrid and multi-cloud application platform built on open-source foundations — most notably Kubernetes and Istio (service mesh). Anthos enables consistent policy enforcement, service management, and workload portability between on-premises data centers and cloud environments, allowing enterprises to modernize applications without a full migration to the public cloud.
Key Technologies Underpinning the Collaboration
The two companies are using a set of complementary open-source technologies to build a unified, end-to-end software delivery system:
- Jenkins X – A cloud-native CI/CD platform designed specifically for Kubernetes, automating preview environments, GitOps-based promotion, and release pipelines.
- Kubernetes – The container orchestration system originally open-sourced by Google and now the de facto standard for running containerized workloads at scale.
- Tekton – A Kubernetes-native framework for building CI/CD pipelines, originally contributed to open source by Google and now a core project under the Continuous Delivery Foundation.
- Service Mesh – Anthos integrates service mesh capabilities (based on Istio) to provide traffic management, observability, and security between microservices.
Shared Commitment to Open Source
A central theme of this partnership is a mutual investment in open-source software. CloudBees has been a primary commercial backer of Jenkins and Jenkins X. Google Cloud has driven foundational projects including Kubernetes and Tekton. Both companies were founding members of the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), a Linux Foundation project established to foster vendor-neutral collaboration around CI/CD best practices, tooling, and industry specifications.
The CDF’s member-driven model is designed to prevent lock-in by standardizing the interfaces and practices that underpin continuous delivery pipelines — a goal aligned with both companies’ stated positions on open toolchains.
Practical Impact for Enterprise DevOps Teams
For engineering teams already running Jenkins-based pipelines, the partnership offers a structured path toward cloud-native delivery on Kubernetes without abandoning existing CI/CD investments. Key benefits highlighted by the two companies include:
- Hybrid flexibility: Run workloads on-premises or in Google Cloud using a consistent platform, reducing the operational gap between environments.
- Modernization without rip-and-replace: Anthos allows teams to containerize and modernize applications incrementally, using existing skills and tooling.
- Faster time to market: Continuous delivery automation, preview environments, and GitOps workflows reduce the manual overhead in getting software from commit to production.
- Resource efficiency: Kubernetes-based scheduling and autoscaling improve utilization of both on-premises and cloud compute resources.
GCP Marketplace Availability
As part of the broader collaboration, CloudBees made its CloudBees Jenkins Distribution — a certified, enterprise-grade distribution of open-source Jenkins — available in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Marketplace. This simplifies procurement and deployment for teams already operating within the Google Cloud ecosystem.
What the Companies Said
“Developers need to build and run applications in a manner that best suits their business, regardless of whether the app will live on-prem or in the cloud. Increasingly, this means adopting a hybrid approach with Anthos, which allows developers to run critical applications in the cloud without entirely eliminating their on-prem infrastructure. We’re delighted to expand our partnership with CloudBees to accelerate application development in hybrid and public cloud environments.”
— Rayn Veerubhotla, Director of Hybrid Cloud Partnerships, Google Cloud
“Our partnership with Google Cloud brings amazing new capabilities to application developers that want to accelerate application development in a modern hybrid environment. Meanwhile, enterprises will be able to modernize applications on-premise or in the cloud with Anthos using existing skills and a consistent platform to get products to market faster and maximize resource utilization.”
— François Déchery, Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder, CloudBees
Summary
The CloudBees and Google Cloud partnership represents a convergence of enterprise CI/CD tooling and hybrid cloud infrastructure, stitched together by open-source projects like Kubernetes, Jenkins X, and Tekton. For DevOps teams navigating multi-cloud or hybrid deployment strategies, the collaboration provides a coherent, vendor-backed path to modern continuous delivery — without abandoning the Jenkins ecosystem that many enterprises have built around.
Teams evaluating this stack should review the Continuous Delivery Foundation project landscape for up-to-date guidance on toolchain choices, as the CI/CD ecosystem has continued to evolve significantly since this announcement.