Over the past few months, we’ve provided an overview of continuous integration/continuous deployment, plus closer looks at CircleCI, Jenkins, and GitLab’s CI/CD capabilities. Now, let’s turn our attention to Atlassian’s CI/CD offering: Bamboo.

When Atlassian comes up, many companies first think of Jira and Confluence, but Atlassian first launched Bamboo way back in 2007. It beats out the brand Jenkins but not Jenkin’s predecessor, Hudson.

Atlassian Bamboo Data Center is an on-prem continuous delivery pipeline that supports teams of any size.

Bamboo Key Capabilities

Bamboo provides automated building and testing of software source code, updates on successful and failed builds, includes reporting tools, and gives dev teams visibility into release artifacts and environments.

Bamboo supports plan branches, which builds and tests any new branch created in the source repository using the same build configuration as the parent plan. One helpful feature is automatic branch management for Mercurial, Git, and Subversion. Manual branching allows the use of other repository types. The default settings can be overridden if you don’t want to use the same config as the parent.

Should you use Bamboo or Bitbucket Pipelines?

Because Jira and Bitbucket integrate fully with Bamboo, Bamboo is an attractive choice for organizations that use multiple Atlassian products and that want full traceability from request to delivery. Easily roll up builds, see their issues, and track their fixes from a single view. Doing this allows your team members to plan their work better and see what you expect from them in the future.

If you’re using Bitbucket Data Center, you should use Bamboo. If you’re using Bitbucket Cloud, the integrated Bitbucket Pipelines may be the natural choice. However, you can use webhooks to integrate Bamboo with Bitbucket Cloud.

Pricing:

Bamboo is self-managed, with unlimited jobs. Pricing is based on the number of remote agents and starts at $1200 annually for one remote agent. You can have multiple remote agents installed, but only one can run at a time if you’re licensed for one.

You can learn more about how using multiple remote agents can speed up build times and when running a limited number of local agents might make sense here. ReleaseTEAM can help you estimate the number of agents and licensing that works for your environment.