Atlassian, makers of development tools such as JIRA and Confluence, have just released version 5.11 of their continuous delivery tool Bamboo with a host of new features to help teams scale and collaborate. The key feature in this new release is the ability to scale from 100 to 250 elastic build agents.
The increase in the number of build agents give the ability to run more simultaneous builds or reduce (or eliminate) the wait time for a build agent. This can be useful when waiting for a build agent to deploy a critical fix or in circumstances where you might have hundreds of slow running tests grouped into many nodes that have the can keep agents busy for an indefinie amount of time.
In relation to this new scaling functionality, Sepideh Setayeshfar, Product Marketing Manager at Atlassian told InfoQ:
Many of our large customers have told us they're outgrowing the existing 100 licenses limit, and started deploying multiple servers. In addition, they see the need to install more Bamboo agents in the near future. We've worked hard to scale Bamboo beyond this limit in the past year to make it easier for customers to manage their build environment with a single server. Compared to other offerings in the market, we officially support the massive scale of 250 agents and have extensively tested it within Atlassian and a few early adopter customers over the past year.
Scaling to this number of build agents is not without technical challenges and Atlassian recommend that customers disable tunneling and use VPC for better performance when running 250 agents. Atlassian themselves had a number of technical challenges to overcome in the delivery of this new feature:
Ensuring a great server performance for the end user while managing tens of thousands of builds a day was our main focus. Each build agent communicates with the Server and can exchange Gigabytes of data. Dealing with the worst case scenarios and making sure the service continues to stay reliable and performant under pressure was the biggest and most interesting challenge.
Other new features in this release include better integrations across the Atlassian tool suite with an updated version of application links and a new built-in diagnostics tool to get your integrations up and running again. Also, REST APIs can now be used to trigger deployment projects for any external system, new administration permissionsfor creating new repositories have been added and Oracle 12 and Microsoft SQL Server 2014 are supported from this release forward.