Jenkins backer-in-chief  CloudBees has pulled closer to Google with the launch of a Saas-based version of its CI/CD platform, powered by Jenkins X and running on Google’s Cloud.

The platform, was unveiled at Jenkins World/DevOps World, CloudBees’ European shindig in Lisbon, which incidentally now has Google as a main sponsor. It is currently in preview, but should go GA in the second quarter of next year.

CloudBees said the partnership meant users can “enjoy a full cloud native experience for the build-test-deploy lifecycle without having to devote time and resources to managing a cloud implementation.”

More specifically, CloudBees’ CEO Sasha Labourey said that while developers might profess their love of love open source, when it comes down to it, they find having to set everything up themselves “boring”.

Talking to Devclass ahead of the official announcement, Labourey described Kubernetes as “really the next generation operating system – it offers operating system/middleware type services in a generic fashion – that’s really how we see it.”

But, he continued, “A lot of the services from Kubernetes are great infrastructure, but that’s not how developers function…developers don’t care about load balancers, they care about AB testing, blue/green deployment, things like that. So providing an abstraction layer that translates this value into something that can be consumed by developers is very useful.”

As for Google, he said, “they understand that they need to go on premise, to get workloads, they understand they need to be multicloud.”

“And so then it becomes very important to say, how can we provide a layer where we can promote the cloud, where we can leverage Anthos and enable developers to make it happen. And Jenkins X ends up being a perfect match for that.”.

CloudBees has also introduced a user interface (UI) for CloudBees Jenkins X, which it says means users now have a choice to use the CLI or the new graphical environment, depending on which better suits their workflow.

Google and CloudBees are both founding members of the Continuous Delivery Foundation, whose key projects include Jenkins and Jenkins X and Google’s Tekton CI/CD project. Labourey pointed out the organisation’s membership was wider than those two companies. Its most recent new member is Fujitsu.

But, he said, “We’re focused on hybrid workloads. We’re focused on enterprises. We care about this journey. It’s exactly what Google cares about.”