That little company with a big footprint is at it again. This tim,e Atlassian is enabling users to utilize its Bitbucket tool with multiple clouds.
In the run-up to its IPO, developer tool company Atlassian was expected to roll out some product announcements. And so it is, this company, which has long been known for having a different way of doing things, is today announcing an interesting integration between its Bitbucket service and a number of different cloud vendors.
For those unaware, Bitbucket is a web-based hosting service for projects that use either the Mercurial or Git revision control systems. Bitbucket, a competitor to GitHub, offers both commercial plans and free accounts. These tools host a team’s code, ready to be developed, deployed, and managed to infrastructure.
Which is why today’s announcement is so interesting. While these code hosting services are useful, they still require a degree of context shifting to use. A typical developer workload would look something like this: commit, trigger a build, switch to the continuous integration tool of choice, check the status, configure the deployment environment, execute complex scripts, switch back to Bitbucket, start again…
Taking all this context shifting away and allowing developers to deploy without leaving the Bitbucket hosting tool would be a big efficiency driver, and this is what Atlassian is rolling out today. Atlassian has been working with cloud vendors, including Amazon, Microsoft, DigitalOcean, Wercker, and others to close the loop on development workflow.
These integrations leverage the build status API within Bitbucket. Users can utilize Bamboo – Atlassian’s Continuous Integration (CI) tool – or other CI tools of choice. The company also provides documentation to allow organizations to build their own integrations into other CI tools.
With the integration, deployment to staging or production can be effected from within Bitbucket. In the past, that would have required the use of scripts or standalone deployment and configuration tools – now it all happens within the hosting tool.
Atlassian prides itself on not having a traditional enterprise sales model. Indeed, it boasts of not having sales people at all. While I suspect that there is a degree of exaggeration in there, smart and pragmatic integrations like those being announced today do much to encourage customer adoption without the need for all those high-priced salespeople. Nice job Atlassian, and good luck with that IPO!
