Atlassian, a leading provider of enterprise collaboration software for product development teams, today announced the availability of Bamboo 5, Atlassian’s continuous integration and delivery server. With new support for orchestrating deployments, Atlassian Bamboo is the first software of its kind to connect the process of preparing and testing software with the process of releasing it, moving beyond pure build and test infrastructure. It connects issues, commits, test results, and deploys, providing a holistic picture to the entire product team, from project managers and devs to testers and system administrators. This latest release provides continuity in tracking changes from idea and implementation to delivery, bringing development teams and IT organizations closer together and improving efficiency and visibility around the process of releasing software.
“This means they can anticipate releasing and supporting that work in production. Add to that the granular controls over who can deploy to each environment, and you’ve got the fluidity and power to move away from duct-tape and into a repeatable and trustworthy deployment pipeline.”
“The new deployment features in Bamboo 5.0 enhance our capabilities to perform continuous deployments to development and quality assurance environments, resulting in a faster feedback cycle. This, coupled with a custom JIRA workflow and Kanban boards, allows QA to perform drag-and-drop deployments to their target environments,” said Roy Lyons, senior systems engineer for CME Group, the world’s leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace. “Atlassian’s focus on supporting the agile process continues to provide us with the software we need for a high level of quality with a turnaround time to match the speed of today’s fast-paced trading environment.”
Inspired by the DevOps movement
Startups and enterprises alike are striving to break down the long-standing silos between product and operations groups – an approach known as “DevOps” – and unite these teams together around a single, continuous process. Inspired by this movement, Atlassian Bamboo solves the two biggest problems software teams face when delivering product to customers: lack of traceability between build and deployment processes, and lack of visibility into the release-preparation process. Bamboo provides three key advantages to modern software teams:
• Reduce time-to-market: operations staff can automate their work around deployments in the same way that developers and QA (quality assurance) have long been able to do with testing.
• Streamline workflows: with fine-grained access controls, developers and QA can deploy to their own dev and test environments on demand, while production remains tightly regulated.
• Speed disaster recovery: complete traceability and transparency around releases makes emergency troubleshooting faster and more collaborative.
“Duct-taped and inaccessible scripts are what most software deployment pipelines are made of,” said Jean-Michel Lemieux, Atlassian’s vice president of engineering. “But the trip a feature takes from a developer’s machine to a customer must happen as quickly and repeatedly as possible, and must be visible to all teams. With Bamboo, we put development-centric information side-by-side with both the deployment tooling and the ops-centric information inside JIRA.”
Bamboo 5 connects with JIRA, Atlassian’s flagship project management issue tracking software, to present the entire team with a clear view of whether a given feature or bug fix has been delivered, as well as what changes are coming in an application’s next version. For developers, testers, and managers, tracking issues and deployments together delivers instant insight into where features are in the release pipeline. For operations engineers, it provides the ability to anticipate upcoming changes and mitigate any risk in advance.
“Everyone sees the issues and code changes in each build and deployment,” added Lemieux. “This means they can anticipate releasing and supporting that work in production. Add to that the granular controls over who can deploy to each environment, and you’ve got the fluidity and power to move away from duct-tape and into a repeatable and trustworthy deployment pipeline.”
Bridging the gap between Dev and Ops, one release at a time
Atlassian has seen a significant rise in Bamboo adoption. Teams from companies as diverse as NASA, EMC, Verizon, Mercedes-Benz, GE Global Research and Flipboard include Bamboo in their software toolset to get more out of investments in technologies like Git, Amazon EC2, and test automation. More than 140 companies eager to reap the benefits of continuous delivery and “DevOps” have signed up for the Bamboo 5 beta program.
“The new deployment support allows us to take our automation and teamwork a step further,” said beta participant Jan Swaelens, architect at Sofico, a Dutch maker of automotive financing and fleet management software. “Thanks to the integration of releases with our builds and tests, everyone gets a view of exactly what has been deployed and how. This information means significant time savings for QA and less stress for developers.”
Availability
A full-feature free trial is available, and introductory pricing starts at $10. To help developers and IT companies acquire time-saving tips and tricks around adopting DevOps, Atlassian shares their most successful technical and cultural practices online at the Atlassian DevOps microsite.
