Likelihood to Recommend If you value integration over cost, Bamboo is clearly the way to go. It offers tight integration to the rest of the Atlassian suite, and when you need traceability from issue to build, Atlassian is the right way to go. However, if you find yourself needing to save on costs, you may consider taking an approach of rolling your own build system with open source alternatives, such as
Jenkins , if you don't [mind] putting in a little extra elbow grease.
Read full review SaltStack is a very well architected toolset and framework for reliably managing distributed systems' complexity at varied scale. If the diversity of kind or number of assets is low, or the dependencies are bounded and simple, it might be overkill. Realization that you need SaltStack might come in the form of other tools, scripts, or jobs whose code has become difficult, unreliable, or unmaintainable. Rather than a native from-scratch SaltStack design, be aware that SaltStack can be added on to tools like Docker or Chef and optionally factor those tools out or other tools into the mix.
Read full review Pros Levels of granularity. Organization has many projects that have many build plans that have many jobs that have many tasks, etc. And branch builds allow source control branches to be built separately. Versatility. I can use bamboo to manage my Java, node, or .NET build plans. I can use it to spin up Windows or Linux build agents, or install it on a Mac to build there as well. Bamboo integrates with other Atlassian products like Bitbucket, Stash, JIRA, etc. If a company commits to the entire Atlassian stack then work can be tracked through the whole development lifecycle which is really useful. Read full review Targeting is easy and yet extremely granular - I can target machines by name, role, operating system, init system, distro, regex, or any combination of the above. Abstraction of OS, package manager and package details is far advanced beyond any other CRM I have seen. The ability to set one configuration for a package across multiple distros, and have it apply correctly no matter the distrospecific naming convention or package installation procedure, is amazing. Abstraction of environments is similarly valuable - I can set a firewall rule to allow ssh from "management", and have that be defined as a specific IP range per dev, test, and prod. Read full review Cons Extremely hard barrier to entry for non-backend developers Blackbox makes it hard to customize functionality The inability to add features without breaking core functionality No cloud solution Tasks cannot be put in if/else statements No clear right way to form build plans Read full review Managing network hardware should be more native and easy SaltStack should buffer jobs and, when a client returns, make sure it is executed proberly SaltStack should provide basic pillar and states structures to help get newbies started Read full review Usability Bamboo was fairly easy to navigate but in the end it always felt as if it was developed as a bolt-on and not a true group up user interface. There were multiple ways to get to everything and the path was never the same. So it was difficult for users to really get a feel of how to use the application.
Read full review Support Rating Support for Bamboo has started lack a little over the years. Atlassian has been moving more towards
Bitbucket Pipelines and away from the on-premise install of Bamboo. While the tool is still great, it may take a little bit of time to get a question answered by official support.
Read full review We haven't had to spend a lot of time talking to support, and we've only had one issue, which, when dealing with other vendors is actually not that bad of an experience.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We selected Bamboo because its capabilities to integrate with other
Atlassian products specially
Jira Software ,
Bitbucket and in some useful scenarios with
Confluence . Also, we found these pros important for us: great user interface, easily agent deployment, Docker compability, simply to maintain / manage, and straightforwardly integration with different notification platforms
Read full review We moved to SaltStack from Puppet about 3 years ago. Puppet just has too much of a learning curve and we inherited it from an old IT regime. We wanted something we could start fresh with. Our team has never looked back. SaltStack is so much easier for us to use and maintain.
Read full review Return on Investment It helped us achieve the Continuous Deployment and Continuous Integration goals for our applications, a huge milestone that saved a lot of time for developers in making the builds and deployments and saved time for QA in running the automated tests. Helped with DevOps: we moved the formal approval from the email to the system and allowed the approver to actually push the button for the production deployments. Biggest positive impact of using Bamboo is that it improved our response time to customers and increased the frequency of our deliveries to them. Read full review We manage two complex highly available self-healing (all infrastructure and systems) environments using SaltStack. Only one person is needed to run SaltStack. That is a HUGE return on investment. Building tooling on top of SaltStack has allowed us to share administrative abilities by role - e.g. employee X can deploy software Y. No need to call a sysadmin and etc. Recovery from problems, or time to stand-up new systems is now counted in minutes (usually under eight) rather than hours. This is a strategic advantage for rolling out new services. Read full review ScreenShots