Creation of an Automated Deployment Pipeline using Atlassian Bamboo

Case Study at a Glance

The Challenge

Audit and improve the existing software deployment pipelines

Reduce time to deployment and save costs

The Solution

Fully functional setup of Atlassian Bamboo for building and testing

Focus on the requirements, and future scalability

Customer demo and full documentation of the solution

The Benefit

Faster results with less resources

Around the clock support

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The Challenge

The Research and Development (RnD) division of a leading global display manufacturer recently approached Automation Consultants (AC) to audit and improve their existing software deployment pipelines.

The primary requirement was to design and implement an automated system that built the application and performed specialised component tests.

The customer wished to automate their testing process in order to reduce time to deployment and save costs. The customer currently uses the following Atlassian Applications: Jira Server, Confluence Server and Bitbucket. The tests require specialised hardware, which required them to be run on separate machines.

The Solution

Given the existing Atlassian Applications in use, AC decided to use Bamboo to meet the customers’ requirements. Bamboo is Atlassian’s on-premise CI/CD Application that enables users to create pipelines. The pipelines can be ran on the bamboo server using local agents, or on remote servers using the remote agents. Bamboo integrates easily with Atlassian Jira and Bitbucket making user management straightforward. AC aimed to provide a fully functional setup of Bamboo for building and testing the customers’ applications. The process consisted of the following steps:

AC performed a deep dive to fully understand the testing process for the applications in scope. AC conducted these tests on a non-production environment using our solution for automation, this enabled AC to verify the efficiency of the solution.

AC setup a manual build plan taking advantage of a Bamboo spec feature using YAML files. This plan was triggered for any commit to the master branch of the GIT/Bitbucket repository.

AC setup remote agents on two remote servers, with dedicated hardware for running test, and took advantage of the artifact feature within Bamboo. This feature enabled the remote servers to run the application without being built leading to an overall reduction in time taken to test their application.

AC provided the customer with the most cost effective solution focusing on the requirements, and future scalability. Atlassian offers different licensing options where the number of jobs that can be run simultaneously in a given pipeline and the number of remote agents that connect to a given Bamboo Server can be chosen.

The project concluded by providing a customer demo to showcase the steps involved and the solution overall. This handover enabled the customer in how to use the solution going forward. In addition, AC provided full documentation of solution.

The Benefits

AC were able to provide a high standard solution that satisfied all the requirements stated by the customer. Once the testing is complete, Bamboo will notify the staff of the outcome with appropriate logs. This solution was validated by key stakeholders.

Faster results with less resources

The solution reduced the time taken to build and test by up to 50%. In addition, the solution eliminated the need to have 2 staff resources involved with a deployment.

Around the clock support

The customer was also pleased that AC was able to work around the 8 hour times difference and was on call for impromptu meetings out of the UK working hours. The customer has registered further interest with AC to setup a Bamboo pipelines for another one of their applications, currently in initial stages of development.