Migrating from Jenkins to Bamboo: Clearvision’s development team’s story
Find out what happened when Clearvision's development team migrated from Jenkins to Bamboo and which tool they prefer for continuous integration.
- September 2, 2017
We love Jenkins
The Clearvision development team loved Jenkins – and so did I. It was about six years ago when I changed the build system from the previous BuildBot-based system to Hudson (and later Jenkins). The world pretty much changed for us back then.
Jenkins became part of our daily lives and in that process, Jenkins became a friend (cue “aww”).
The Migration
Then, a few weeks ago, we decided that it was time to move everything over to Bamboo. We knew how good Bamboo was on paper, but as we so often find, there was never a good time to take the plunge.
When we finally did, with one our own internal development projects, we were not prepared for how much it would change our lives. Again.
Bamboo takes some of the Jenkins ideas to another level. The concepts are just so much cleaner and hierarchical, they make builds easier to understand and make dependencies obvious (and visual).
- Build Plans have stages, which have jobs, which have tasks
The build has not passed until the complete build plan has completed. Bamboo will not move on to the next stage until all jobs within the stage have completed. And all jobs within a stage can implicitly be run in parallel as they do not depend on each other.
All of this may sound trivial, but if you’ve ever attempted to chain dependent jobs together in Jenkins (and then tried to understand what’s wrong when they are executed in the wrong order), then you will know what I’m talking about. And because of how builds are structured and results are presented, making changes and fixing problems in the build itself is also pretty straightforward.
At this point, we were only a few days into our Bamboo deployment, and as a team team we were already impressed! We were fans of the front-end performance and how Bamboo summarised results in such a fashion that identifying code problems became much easier (without having to trawl through tons of logs). Even the guys who were adamant that the world would end when we turned off Jenkins were impressed with Bamboo.
And then we made our builds elastic.
Bamboo has a very good integration with Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud 2). You have full control over when new build agents are spun up in the Amazon cloud, and you can minimise the cost by having them spun down when idle.
Because Bamboo spins EC2 instances up and down for you, you feel that you can afford to go for the faster m3.large SSD backed instances, and build performance increases.
Where We Are Now
We now have a hybrid build with some build agents in the office and elastic agents are used to supplement the system at busy times, with minimal cost impact, which makes for both a happy team and happy management.
In fact, the new build server we were about to order has now been put on hold!
So, Jenkins changed our lives, but Bamboo changed everything all over again – for the better. And the best bit is, we’ve only scratched the surface. There’s so much more to Bamboo.
As for Jenkins, it certainly still has its place in the market – it’s great for medium-complexity projects with a manageable set of dependencies. As our needs have grown, we’ve found so far that Bamboo is the stronger offering when you’re dealing with lots of dependencies.
Find out more about optimising your deployment, and start building software your way!
clearvisionwebmaster
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