Diving into DevOps

Atlassian Furthers Quest to Bring 'DevOps to the Enterprise'

• By John K. Waters
• May 22, 2017

Software development and collaboration toolmaker Atlassian, a company that began dipping a toe into DevOps waters just a few months ago, has waded in deeper with updates of two of its signature products: the Bitbucket cloud-based DVCS hosting service, and the Bamboo continuous integration (CI) server.

With the release of Bitbucket Server 5.0, Bitbucket Data Center 5.0, and Bamboo 6.0, the company continues its quest to bring "DevOps to the enterprise."

The Bamboo upgrade includes a new feature called Bamboo Specs, which allows the entire configuration of Bamboo plans to be stored as source code. This feature moves the management of plans from the Bamboo UI to the developer's IDE, explained Cameron Deatsch, head of Atlassian's Enterprise Growth organization.

"People who are running dozens or hundreds of build agents and many, many build plans wanted something more flexible and usable," Deatsch told ADTmag. "Allowing them to run their configurations in code in Bamboo itself means they don't have to go into the UI and redo the whole thing every time they want to change their configurations."

Defining plan configurations as code not only simplifies application build, Deatsch added, it supports things like code reuse, proper code reviews, and versioning. The Specs capability is native to Bamboo starting with the 6.0 release.

The Bitbucket upgrade affects the company's two behind-the-firewall deployment models: Bitbucket Server (for single nodes, single servers, aimed at team and department deployments), and Bitbucket Data Center (for clusters of servers demanding high availability and high performance).

The 5.0 releases of both tools come with a new committer verification feature designed to address compliance requirements by enforcing rules that allow only the author of a commit to push included changes back to the central repository. It also stores a log of code changes for audit purposes.

"We have a strong enterprise security and compliance story around Bitbucket Server and Data Center," Deatsch said, "which is why people choose us over other alternative Git repositories. Both were built internally as a result of us solving our own compliance and security problems, things we ran into as the company grew and matured."

The company also announced improved integration among Bitbucket, Bamboo, and JIRA. Originally launched a simple Java-based bug tracker, JIRA has evolved from to become a widely used project management solution. The tighter link among the products takes the integration beyond the commit level, Deatsch said, to repository level shortcuts that allow teams to connect a repository to any related asset.

How are these upgrades about DevOps?

"It all comes down to developer productivity," Deatsch said. "It's our mission in life is to help people ship stuff faster and at a higher quality. If you talk with anyone who is running a DevOps practice, one or all of the tools in the Atlassian toolset will come up in that conversation. The core value we provide is linking the Ops team with the development team. By automating and linking our tools, we can deliver on that promise better."