Atlassian Bitbucket Introduction:
A product by Atlassian, Bitbucket is an open-source Git repository that provides centralized access to the users for managing their own source code. Atlassian’s server hosts Bitbucket cloud infrastructure, which comes with various interesting features such as access control, workflow control, pull requests, Jira integration, full support for REST API.
Bitbucket can be deployed in three different ways, listed as follows:
- Bitbucket Cloud:
It is hosted on the server and has an in-built continuous integration tool known as Pipeline that facilitates building, testing, and deploying from Bitbucket directly. The architecture of pipelines creates containers within which users can run their commands with customized configurations, as per requirement.
- Bitbucket Server:
The server for Bitbucket is hosted on-premise and provides a very robust framework for integration with Bamboo that completely syncs continuous integration and deployment needs. Users can plan to automate their build process.
- Bitbucket Data Center:
A Data Center is hosted on different servers within a cluster for a specific user’s environment and offers several benefits, such as –
- A cluster of machines running on a Bitbucket server can handle the load, that is, performance is scalable with Bitbucket data centers.
- In case one cluster stops working, the remaining can continue taking requests so that users do not witness unavailability.
- Smart monitoring facilitates improvements in Git speeds with respect to distributed teams.
Features of Atlassian, Bitbucket
Bitbucket cloud provides best in class integration mechanism with Jira that sorts almost all needs pertaining to build, track, and deploy any software.
Here are a few key features that will help the readers dive deeper into the benefits of using Bitbucket as the cloud integration tool.
- Best in class Jira Integration Bitbucket lets its users create and manage issues in Jira and automatically takes care of the issue status by entering the issue key in commits. It helps the project teams to keep activities aligned as they can track all their builds, deployment statuses listed alongside the issues.
- DevOps toolchain
Bitbucket, being a solution for DevOps teams, keeps the development, IT operations, and business teams connected to stay updated on various products and third-party tools. Users have the flexibility to choose from among their set of tools or select tools from Bitbucket or a blend of both.
- Integrated CI/CD
Bitbucket facilitates continuous integration and development by supporting the integration of tools such as Bamboo, Jenkins, or any other third-party tool. This cloud infrastructure has pipelines, which is a solution towards CI/CD, alongside repositories, so that development goes on seamlessly.
- Enhanced security
A wide range of enterprise-grade security features come with Bitbucket such as IP whitelisting, IPv6 support, and a few others. Bitbucket assures GDPR compliance to keep code and data over the cloud safe.
The features of Bitbucket cloud can be further broken down to understand its functionality. The following categories have been listed to understand the contributions Bitbucket has to offer-
Administration
- Workspace administration: The user of Bitbucket is assigned as a workspace admin who can control access management to the workspace, which is a collection of repositories, a platform for code collaboration, and facilitates the organization of different streams of work.
- Repository administration: An administrator can grant individual or group users to read or write permission for accessing a repository.
- Project administration: In the Bitbucket server, projects have the authority to allow a user to group repositories and manage permissions for them.
Security and compliance
- Access control : This security mechanism allows keeping a check on unauthorized access to workspace content. Access to private content could be controlled with the help of the following two ways -
- IP Allowlisting: Access can be granted for authorized access to predefined IP addresses and secure access to private accounts. That is, users could view private content or repositories only from certain IP addresses.
- 2FA verification: Two-step verification ensures secure logins. A user with a Bitbucket cloud account should have 2FA enabled to interact with other private content.
Workflow management
- Branch permissions: Such permissions are granted for access to specific workflows so that other modules in that repository remain unaffected. For instance, a new user might be granted permission to access a repository, without much knowledge he might delete or change something in the workflow. Branch permissions are aimed to prevent such occurrences.
- Merge checks: This feature facilitates setting up merge checks on pull requests by any user.
- Deployment permissions: Such permissions allow developers to take care of deployments within their respective environments. Branch restrictions can also be set up for restricting deployment to critical environments such as production.
Apps and Integration
Bitbucket cloud supports a wide range of security, code scanning, artifact management tool integration such as JFrog, Snyk, AwesomeGraphs, and a few others.
The following are the products from Atlassian, which can be integrated with Bitbucket cloud –
- Jira cloud integration:
Jira integration enables viewing work in progress and facilitates completion of work across an organization's workflow. Jira software integration helps in managing deployments, users can view issues on the Jira dashboard to be aware of what is being worked on and what has been delivered to the customers.
Bitbucket allows automation with build and deployment triggers, which helps connecting Bitbucket work to the Jira cloud. With Jira cloud, users can resolve issues and update the same, and that is visible to the team on the dashboard.
- Jira Service Management Integration:
Automated change management in Jira service management cloud and Bitbucket pipelines is a self-paced process. That is, in case there is any change request, the same is created in Jira Service Management and then triggers deployment once the changes are approved. It pauses the CI/CD process in the meantime.
Benefits of Bitbucket
- Bitbucket is a lot more flexible in terms of the built-in features. Imports into Bitbucket can be done from Git, SourceForge, SVN, Google Code, to name a few.
- A very refined pricing model exists for Bitbucket cloud. It comes at absolutely no cost up to five users, including unlimited private repositories. With each upgrade, users can increase their capacity of storage and the number of builds that can be supported.
- A very strong security mechanism makes it a safe choice for securing private content.
- Bitbucket offers smarter semantic searching, which makes it very easy to find definitions matching user queries than just variable names.
Conclusion
With Bitbucket's support for third-party application integration, along with security and easy accessibility, developers can totally go for this solution to keep up with their continuous integration and development process in a DevOps culture.
