Atlassian has moved Bitbucket Pipelines, its cloud-based application development tool focused on continuous delivery and integration, into production. The company envisions the service as a boon for microservices deployments.
With Bitbucket Pipelines, teams can build, test, and deploy applications without having to set up a CI/CD server. Pipelines supports the entire development workflow, with coding and configuration unified in one environment.
"In Bitbucket, now you have the source code and the infrastructure as code, and those things are living together and connected now going forward," said Sean Regan, Atlassian head of marketing for Jira, Bitbucket, and Devtools. Tests can be executed from the same place where code is stored, and code can be pushed out to cloud platforms like Amazon.
Atlassian sees increasing momentum for cloud-based deployments and microservices, and it's accommodating this with Pipelines. Microservices have become a driver of the cloud repository movement and cloud pipelines adoption, with organizations shipping code multiple times a day, Regan said.
Cloud-based CI/CD processes are evolving rapidly toward container architectures, said IDC analyst Al Hilwa. "This evolution is generally a lot slower inside the firewall. In this context, offering the container-focused Bitbucket Pipelines technology in the cloud makes a lot of sense. I think Pipelines is better suited for handling development the way it is evolving in the cloud."
Bitbucket Pipelines is "going to be free for at least the rest of the year," said Regan. Afterward, it will be priced at 1 cent per minute for building and testing source code.
While Pipelines provides built-in CI/CD services, Atlassian still sees a need for CI/CD servers like Jenkins, at least for companies keeping their code in-house. "There's a set of companies that really will live behind the firewall for some time," Regan said. But by emphasizing cloud initiatives, Atlassian is "skating to where the puck is going," with cloud-based development and repositories, he added.
Bitbucket Pipelines and cloud development can get a developer out of the "Jenkins jail idea," where they have to spend time managing Jenkins infrastructure and setting up agents for integration, Regan said. "That developer can go back to writing code rather than managing their pipelines."