Australian software company Atlassian’s Elastic Bamboo further illustrates the growing pervasiveness of cloud computing thinking in the IT industry.
By Steve Hodgkinson
26 Mar 2009
Australian software company Atlassian’s Elastic Bamboo further illustrates the growing pervasiveness of cloud computing thinking in the IT industry. The Bamboo continuous integration server now enables elegant access to Amazon’s EC2 cloud resources as required to process test workloads.
Atlassian has been quick off the mark with light touch tools to boost teamwork
Australian software company Atlassian is going from strength to strength ‘selling shovels in the gold rush’ – providing products and tools for software development and collaboration. Its products provide automation support for many stages in the development lifecycle, and have a particular focus on improving communication and developer productivity.
A quintessential start-up success story, the company was founded by Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes in 2002. It now has 195 employees with 14,900 customers around the globe – and offices in Sydney, San Francisco and Amsterdam. Products include JIRA (issues management), Confluence (enterprise wiki), FishEye (source code repository), Bamboo (continuous integration server), Clover (system testing code coverage), Crowd (single sign-on), Crucible (peer code review) and JIRA Studio (an integrated development suite).
Atlassian’s early products, such as JIRA, occupied a niche between open source and commercial software, tapping into the viral marketing effect and simplified deployment possibilities afforded to companies that have grown up on the Internet.
Confluence further extended Atlassian’s collaboration capabilities, quickly growing beyond its developer roots to the point where it is now a leading enterprise wiki platform, used by over 7,000 organisations. Customers include some substantial corporate deployments, such as 16,000 users at BearingPoint (still operating though currently in the midst of Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings), tens of thousands of users at Cisco and 25,000 users at Sun Microsystems.
The latest release of its Bamboo product, Elastic Bamboo, continues Atlassian’s theme of providing light-touch tools responding to unmet teamwork needs at the leading edge of development practice.
Elastic Bamboo allows developers to seamlessly integrate Amazon’s cloud into their development environment
Bamboo is a continuous integration server, designed to support frequent integration of code under development with the main body of the release. New code can automatically be compiled and tested as it is developed, accelerating the feedback loop and minimising the ‘chasing your tail’ effect that arises when teams of developers periodically apply new code to a constantly changing code base.
However, continuous integration can create large and unpredictable server workloads as multiple cycles of integration and testing are carried out – particularly in the lead up to a major release. Scaling up the hardware to accommodate peak loads is not necessarily a viable option.
Elastic Bamboo enables developers to use a mix of on-premise or remote (cloud-based) agents for integration and testing, minimising the need to bolster local resources to accommodate peak testing loads. The system provides seamless access to the processing resources of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
Multiple remote agents can be set running in parallel under the control of a supervisor – for example, to run tests on multiple different operating system platforms.
Flexible cloud – great, just don’t forget to keep an eye on the bill
Bamboo has quite a few competitors, including commercial software such as Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server and open source software such as Apache Continuum. However, Atlassian is continuing its track record of light-touch innovation – demonstrating how cloud computing can provide an elegant solution to the problem of resource bottlenecks in continuous integration.
Tools such as Elastic Bamboo provide a glimpse of a future where developers will learn to seamlessly integrate on-premise and cloud computing as a matter of second nature. Applications will – at a click – run on premise, in the cloud, or burst to resources in the cloud as and when required.
As long as someone keeps an eye on the charges being racked up on the Amazon Web Services bill...
Steve Hodgkinson is a research director in government at Ovum
