<p>CloudBees rolled out some new tools on Monday, ClickStarts and ClickStacks, to help it take on Google, Microsoft, VMware, Amazon, and Red Hat on platform clouds.</p><p>The new tools will help customers build custom development environments, reports Wired Enterprise's Klint Finley:</p><p>One downside to using platform clouds is that they can be rigid. It's easier to get started on a platform cloud as opposed to an infrastructure cloud such as Amazon Web Services which merely offers access to raw computing resources, such as virtual servers but a platform cloud also provides less flexibility. And with Amazon now offering its own platform-ish service called Elastic Beanstalk, more cloud providers are trying to bridge the gap between infrastructure clouds and platform clouds. CloudBees is the latest to try to solve this problem.</p><p>ClickStarts are essentially templates. Users will be able to define a particular architecture and save it to use in future projects or pick from several pre-built templates. ClickStacks go even further by allowing users to add additional development languages and tools to their CloudBees environment, including alternative Java Virtual Machine langauges like Scala and Clojure.</p><p><a href="http://www.wired.com/cloudline/2012/10/cloudbees-sting/">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/story/cloudbees-hosted-jenkins-devcloud-now-supports-deployment-to-google-app-engine-2012-10-01">CloudBees Hosted Jenkins, DEV@cloud, Now Supports Deployment to Google ...</a> (MarketWatch (press release))</p><p><a href="http://www.virtual-strategy.com/2012/10/01/cloudbees-announces-major-platform-extensions-simple-provisioning-and-customization">CloudBees Announces Major Platform Extensions for Simple Provisioning and ...</a> (Virtual-Strategy Magazine (press release))</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?pz=1&ned=us&ncl=dHUF2o0uC8yPTwMcM8T69uQUZTpoM">9 additional articles.</a></p>