Bam!Boo!
January 12, 2017
Bam!Boo!
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Bamboo
Bamboo is being used by CDK Global as the primary tool for continuous integration and delivery. We use Bamboo for the build servers at our company, and to deploy to the cloud infrastructure for promotion through various environments like development, development integration, performance, quality assurance, staging, and production.
Bamboo is used across the organization for all R&D of new products. CDK is working to transition all products to use Bamboo, but it has a lot of them. Bamboo solves the problem of needing to build a product in a reproducible way that is not dependant on anything that exists on an individual developer's computer. It allows us to deploy a deterministically generated image from a central location. I think that Bamboo is a good product, but CDK could make better use of it if they could start all over, but they are sort of stuck with the current implementation they have because it is hard to change quickly.
Bamboo is used across the organization for all R&D of new products. CDK is working to transition all products to use Bamboo, but it has a lot of them. Bamboo solves the problem of needing to build a product in a reproducible way that is not dependant on anything that exists on an individual developer's computer. It allows us to deploy a deterministically generated image from a central location. I think that Bamboo is a good product, but CDK could make better use of it if they could start all over, but they are sort of stuck with the current implementation they have because it is hard to change quickly.
- 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.
- Unclear what different levels of granularity should be used for. How is a Job and a Task and a Build and a Project different? It requires a consultant to help not make a mess of this. It takes a while to search all the Projects in CDK, there are way way too many.
- Not particularly useful compared to free open source solutions, unless you buy into other Atlassian products. I.e. most of the value is in the integration
- Bamboo is not great at estimating how long a build will take. The progress bar for a build completes long before it it is actually done.
- Speed of delivery is improved, because we have faith that a build is reproducible
- Less time troubleshooting and setting up build servers, since Bamboo allows for the abstractions in virtual machine or container format
- Fewer full time employees needed to manage development resources and deployments, since it is all automated
I use bamboo because it is mandated as the CI/CD solution to use across the organization that I work for. If I were working on my own project, I would almost certainly use a free solution like Travis CI or just spin up my own build servers using Docker, AWS, or something like that. Bamboo is good for CDK because it provides a lot of infrastructure to handle many many builds across an organization, and CDK has thousands of employees.