Discover how making the move from Perforce to Git at Expedia lead to standing room-only training sessions abundant with high fives. The move to Git improved Expedia's software development with faster development cycles, deeper integrations, increased transparency, and a more unified development platform.
Atlassian shot into the Enterprise with the release of their revolutionary JIRA Data Center in July, followed by Confluence Data Center in August. Major companies worldwide relying on Enterprise-level, mission-critical processes rejoiced- and now, they have even more reason to celebrate! Now Stash, the popular source code management for Git, is the newest Data Center offering from Atlassian. Currently in its beta version, the first and only platform of its kind to provide a highly available, scalable solution to collaborative Git teams of unlimited sizes with countless products and processes, Stash Data Center brings optimal uptime, the utmost reliability and unlimited scalability. It's only been a week since Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes introduced us to Stash Data Center in the Opening Keynote of Summit, but the IT community is already buzzing over the newest addition to the Atlassian Enterprise family!
Using active-active node clustering, your Stash instance is always up and running! Should a node go down, the load balancer distributes the processes of the failed component to keep your workflow moving and kick off node repair. Once the node is fixed, Stash Data Center automatically updates your data with rapid re-indexing so you never miss a beat.
Whatever size your instance, Stash Data Center scales to your needs. The platform ensures your Git repository can be accessed quickly, efficiently and at all times- no matter how many users and functions are running concurrently. Have more data than you can handle? Just add another node to your instance to help share the load
Control who has access and permissions within your Git repository with Stash Data Center's robust security options, as well as customizable workflows to get the right code to the right people. Operating on premise and behind the firewall and using global, project, repository and branch level permissions, Stash Data Center provides the safest way yet to run mission-critical Git processes.
Atlassian thrilled new and existing users across the world with their six big product announcements and Enterprise teams everywhere cheered over Stash Data Center!
The following content was taken from Atlassian.com
This is the third blog post of a three part series where we focus on migrating the Jira code base from Subversion to Git. We wanted to share Atlassian’s migrating experience to those of you who are contemplating moving a large project to Git – without sacrificing active development. In our first post we discussed why we decided to make the switch to Git. In our second post we dove in the technical details of switching from Subversion to Git.
So you might know that you can run a pretty slick migration from the technical side, minimize commit downtime and ensure high availability of your supporting infrastructure. But are your developers ready for the change?
The opinions of Jira developers on the migrations varied from, “Git is the most wonderful thing to ever happen to Jira,” to, “I know Git’s better than SVN but I need training,” to, “Just show me how to do what I currently do in SVN in Git”. It’s critical to address the needs of developers across this spectrum.
The VCS you use (along with some other core things like programming language, IDE, frameworks and libraries) is one of your core tools and one of the key areas where you develop skills. Your VCS is the vehicle for technical communication and collaboration. You need to ensure that all developers are fully on board to maximize their own potential. If a developer has any uncertainty or hangups about the tools they use – particularly their VCS - their work can be severely impeded. Atlassian prides itself on openness – people are encouraged to speak up and risk falling flat on their face rather than not speak up at all – but there are all types of companies where we can envisage people hiding, not speaking up about issues if they’re not comfortable.
Also, developers worth their salt feel a connection to the code they write and their infrastructure. The most productive developers feel an ownership of their environment. If you are going to change that environment, like their VCS tool, it needs to be a change that they own and embrace.
Assuming that everyone in your organization can learn Git on-the-fly after the migration is finished is a recipe for failure. Git is fundamentally different to SVN. Being aware of this, making your developers aware of this, and preparing them for Git is critical in making the migration a success.
The first thing we did to get our developers ready was to run a couple of Git training sessions. For example, we started out with, “How to do what you do in SVN, in Git.” This included Git commands for things like committing and demonstrating what tools are available (developers at Atlassian use their IDE, SourceTree, gitg, and the command line to work with Git). More importantly, it focused on explaining the key differences between SVN and Git. What does it mean to have a local repository that’s a clone of the remote repository? What is a working copy? What is the staging area? Finally, a step-by-step guide to cloning the Git repository and getting started fast was introduced and published on our extranet.
Further, Charles Miller (our Confluence Architect) ran a seminar that was a real deep dive into how Git works internally – what data structures it uses internally, and how actual operations like committing work get done. This was optional for all developers, but some people learn by deep investigation which helps onboarding. Also, the more you delve, the more you discover that Git is a wonderfully elegant architecture internally which is valuable for any computer scientist to learn.
We developed these training sessions internally, however there are a number of external companies that run Git training if that is your preference.
While we were running the migration, we kept the team up-to-date on the migration status via email and HipChat, our real-time group chat offering. Every time we reached a milestone, we let the team know. Every time we changed infrastructure, we let the team know – partly as a warning in case things break, but also to keep them updated on how things were progressing. It’s a satisfying feeling when you say to a team member, “Hey, you know that code review you just created, you actually created it off the Git repository,” especially if you can pull it off without anything failing during the change. This regular communication, from within the team, was huge in making each developer feel like they were up to date and owning the change. The worst outcome is if the team feels like this change is forced from outside, or if the tools they use every day are changing under their feet without them knowing.
Let me say this once again: Git is different to SVN and it can take a while for people to adapt. No matter how much you prepare, how much you educate – developers will run into issues when they start actually using it. Left unattended, these issues will reduce productivity and can spiral into hostility to change.
We marked a couple of developers who had Git experience as ‘Git champions’ after the move. Any time people had issues, or didn’t understand things, or just wanted to know, “What did I just do?” or “How did it work?”, they could pull in a Git champion to help them. This was critical to making the change as seamless as possible.
In practice, we found the major difficulty people encountered was not the differences between commands, but the differences in the conceptual model of working copy, local repository and remote repository. Developers had internalized the SVN model. I would say it took 2-6 weeks for each developer to reach the same familiarity with Git.
There are a number of really advanced Git workflows out there that allow you to put the “D” in DVCS. Branches, feature branches, forks and pull requests are just the start. If you switch to these advanced workflows at the same time as you migrate, you are either Albert Einstein leading a team of Nobel laureates, or you are setting yourself up for a fall. We took the principle of “success through stability” into our workflows as well. We started off with exactly the same workflow we used in SVN:
As I mentioned above, our SVN workflow for getting bug fixes from stable to trunk was to manually patch each commit. We kept this workflow when first migrating to Git – each bugfix commit is manually cherry-picked into master. Why would we do this? Git is designed for merging – wasn’t it part of the reason we migrated? To maintain stability, we felt that the change to Git itself was big enough for developers to take on and that changing workflow would only complicate things.
We made our first workflow change about two months after the migration – no more cherry picking. Stable branch merged to master with each commit.
Again, we invested in communicating this change to the team – the motivation why, and a series of steps for how to do it. We re-awoke the Git champions to assist people anytime they had a difficulty. It proved to be a smooth, easy transition. Making small, understandable, iterative changes is what made each change a success.
Once we had settled into a merging workflow, we started embracing the distributed workflows that Git enables.
I mentioned at the start of the article that one of our major products, Jira, now releases to our hosted platform every two weeks. We tend to run with separate teams in separate branches; this enables frequent releases by decoupling separate teams’ work from each other:
This does introduce challenges of its own. Merging multiple sets of changes at the end of an iteration runs the risk of integration conflicts that can cause bugs. In practice, this is mitigated by the fact that individual teams tend to be working on separate areas of the code base. However, if a team or teams are working on areas that are likely to conflict with other teams, they tend to work directly on the master branch. The teams that are running on individual branches pull regularly from master to get these changes regularly and catch the conflicts before they become critical. Thus far, keeping the lines of communication open has prevented these sorts of conflicts from becoming problematic.
Another complicating factor is geography. Jira’s main development is done in Sydney and Gdansk; but on any one day we might get commits from Atlassian teams in San Francisco, Boulder, or Amsterdam. Teams in different cities tend to run on different branches allowing us to get over the communication gap. To facilitate communicating the kind of potential conflicts I mentioned above, we use HipChat (our group chat product) for 1-1 and group announcements and communication; this works extremely well with our distributed team members. The real-time chat rooms kept conversations persistent so when someone logged on from a different time zone, they could check the status of the conversation and get quickly up to speed. Developers were pinged when they were mentioned in a room so they could respond to someone’s query without having to read through the whole conversation.
A quick note on branch strategies: some people advocate a ‘branch-per-feature’ workflow, where each individual story is developed on a feature branch. This is a great workflow if it fits your project. Some products at Atlassian use this. In Jira, our CI overhead is very high. Running what we would consider ‘adequate’ CI on every story that gets developed is not within the bounds of reality for us. Branch per team, however, is working out well.
The migration turned out to be a great success. No developers’ time was lost in limbo where they could not commit. CI ran continually, and we maintained the ability to do a 5.0 release throughout the entire migration. Post migration, we hit each change successfully and today, developers are embracing the power that DVCS gives them. The proof of this is in the complete change in our release cadence. There is no way we could have shifted from a 90-day to 14-day release cycle without DVCS.
This is probably the fifth time I have mentioned this but I cannot stress enough the importance of communication to the rest of your development team. During the migration, do not be afraid of giving it a higher importance than the actual technical migration tasks. It gets the developers to own the change. For those reticent to change, communication decreases worry and helps developers love Git.
The following content was taken from Atlassian.com
In this the first of a three part blog series which focuses on migrating the Jira code base from Subversion to Git. We wanted to share Atlassian’s migrating experience to those of you who are contemplating moving a large project to Git – without sacrificing active development. In our first post we discuss why we decided to make the switch to Git. In our second post we dive in the technical details of switching from Subversion to Git. In our third, and final post we will discuss how we managed the “human” angle to migrating.
Atlassian has been extremely excited about DVCS for a number of years and has invested heavily in DVCS. Atlassian has acquired Bitbucket – a cloud DVCS repository host, developed Stash – a behind the firewall Git repository manager and added DVCS support to FishEye, Atlassian’s code browsing and search tool. They have also added a myriad of DVCS connectors to Jira.
Along with Atlassian we believe DVCS is a great leap forward in software development. As part of this, Atlassian migrated the codebases for their own products and libraries from centralized version control systems (generally SVN) to DVCS. Some of these have been big migrations!
In this three part blog series we will focus on the biggest migration Atlassian has done – migrating the 11-year-old Jira codebase from SVN to Git. What obstacles did they encounter? What lessons did they learn? And most importantly, how did they do it without sacrificing active development on Jira? We hope that sharing this experience helps anyone approaching a similar migration.
We’ll focus on Git, because Jira moved to Git, but everything in this series applies equally to Mercurial. At Atlassian, they use both.
Migrating a big code base is not without cost. The first thing you will need to answer – both for yourself, your bosses, and the people who work for you – is what will DVCS bring us, and why is it worth the cost of migrating?
We have used SVN successfully on many projects. So has Atlassian. And I am sure many people reading this article have also used SVN successfully. Since there is always a cost to migration, you may be inclined to ask, “If Subversion has met my version control needs for many years, why should I change?” To me, that is the wrong question. The real question is, “How can DVCS make what we do today even better?”
Git is known for several things. For a developer working with code, it’s faster. It allows for advanced workflows like feature branching, forks and pull requests – in theory, these workflows are all possible with SVN, however the difficulty of merging in SVN compared to Git makes them untenable. But for anyone moving from SVN, the main benefit of Git is that because of its lightweight branching and easy merging, Git allows you to do your default SVN workflow better than SVN.
What do we mean by this? Let’s talk about how we actually develop and release software. Most of us work in a world where we have at least one released version of our software in the wild, which we call a “stable” branch. We maintain and contribute bug fixes to a stable branch while developing new features on a “development” branch (which is called trunk/master/default depending on which VCS you use).
When we commit bug fixes to stable, we need to get them into master too. SVN merge is known to be a pain and works solely on revision history – not actual content. As a result, a lot of people avoid it, or they do it infrequently and not as part of their day-to-day workflow. How many projects have you worked on where stable and development branches have started to diverge, or diverged so significantly that the effort to bring them back together is a real project cost? Many have certainly been in projects where this has happened, and when we speak to other developers it’s a frequent occurrence with SVN. There are some strategies to deal with it. For example, with Atlassian’s issues and tracking software, Jira, they ignored merging and required developers to make each commit individually to each stable and development branch, relying on QA to make sure that it happened correctly.
Git allows you to remove this pain. Git makes merging so easy that merging the entire stable branch into the development branch on each commit is a reality; it’s now Atlassian’s default workflow. So even if you don’t want to use feature branches or forks or pull requests immediately, Git provides advantages from day one.
And when Atlassian was ready, they were in a position to take advantage of the advanced workflows that Git allows. Before the switch to DVCS, Atlassian’s major products targeted 90-day release cycles. These 90-day releases went to two platforms: downloadable products for clients to install on their own servers; and a release to Atlassian’s hosted cloud platform (Atlassian OnDemand) for which clients pay a monthly fee. Using branches as a core part of development workflow has allowed Atlassian to shorten this to the point where they now release major products to the cloud every 2 weeks.
Jira is a decent size code base to move – 11 year’s worth of history, 47,228 commits across approximately 21,000 files. Atlassian averages about 30 different committers over a two-week period. More than that, the VCS is a real work-horse for a project like Jira. Builds, code reviews, scripts for releasing both product distributions and source… all these things have a rich tapestry of dependencies on the source code management system.
Their main goal in the migration was to minimize interruption to developers. This is about more than just the ability to commit code; it is about the infrastructure surrounding software development.
Atlassian has 3.5 years of history in Jira’s code review system.
Jira has a lot of CI. Atlassian runs approximately 60 build plans over different configurations and branches.
They have some other dependencies too – Jira has a somewhat complex release process that involves pulling together code from multiple sources. Atlassian also releases their source code to customers, which involves a different set of build scripts.
There is a tradeoff here between how fast you can migrate and how stably you can do it – Atlassian’s guiding principle was to optimize for stability over speed. If you set a deadline for your migration and it slips, what’s the worst that happens? Developers have to commit code to SVN for another week or so. Not the end of the world. It’s far worse if the migration interrupts developers’ ability to work and meet their own deadlines.
In the end, the migration took 14 days in total, with only a total of two hours where developers were unable to commit code. Atlassian were nearing the end of the development cycle for their latest release, Jira 5, and at no point were they unable to cut a release candidate.
When preparing the migration, there are a couple of things to be aware of.
First, it will take time. The actual git-svn clone, which takes all of the commits in the SVN repository and replicates them in Git, took three days for Atlassian.
Second, you should prepare and think of all the dependencies your infrastructure has on your VCS. And know that if your infrastructure is sufficiently complex (like Atlassian’s), there will be things you never dreamed of and only discover when they break. So don’t beat yourself up when you encounter a dragon. Just slay it, and continue on your quest.
A migration like this is not something you can do overnight, or even over a weekend. It needs to be managed for a sustained period of time.
Stably migrating is daunting but it is not brain surgery; there is a process Atlassian has employed to make it manageable. In part 2 of Atlassian’s Switch to Git series we walk through, step-by-step, the technical details on migrating from Subversion to Git.
Bamboo 3.4‘s ready for download and ready to spread a little joy for the holidays. This release provides some gifts for Atlassian’s Git users, and will bring joy to those expanding their continuous integration process into the cloud.
Git users can get more out of Bamboo during their holiday break. Satisfying many votes from our Git users, Bamboo’s integration with Git’s now compatible with Git submodules. Git submodules are simply a reference to another repository at a particular snapshot in time.
The new support for Git submodules allows Atlassian users to structure your projects the way you want, and makes it easy to build multi-module projects. The full capabilities of your Git client are now at your disposal for Git-based development. Simple and powerful, just like Git!
Note: Building with Git submodules requires that you have a native Git client and add it as an agent capability in Bamboo. If you’ve not configured your agent capabilities to use your native Git client Bamboo will use the embedded Git client (which doesn’t support submodules).
Curious about Git submodules and how you can use them? Learn about Git submodules here.
The holidays are all about sharing, so Atlassian thought repositories in Bamboo should join the fun. In Atlassian’s previous Bamboo release, Atlassian introduced the ability to monitor and check out code from multiple repositories. Multiple repositories in Bamboo are great for both small projects that wish to build and include externally developed open source software as part of their project, and large projects that consist of multiple modules located in different repositories. Whether you are working on a small or large project, you may be using the same repositories across multiple build plans in Bamboo. Following the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle, you can now share your repositories across these plans. Bulk manage repositories across multiple plans with a single configuration change. For admins, that means you don’t have to edit each plan/job to change a repository. All you have to do is go into the Shared Source Repositories, and make your changes there.
A huge time saver for those trying to keep repositories in sync across multiple plans.
Define a shared repository that can be used globally. From there, you can share the configuration with as many plans as you want.
After you update your shared repository configuration, the changes will be picked up by all Plans that use that repository. Share away!
Give your team the ultimate gift, more build power. For those of you taking advantage of elastic agents in the Amazon EC2 cloud, Atlassian now has Windows and .NET support.
Growing capacity
Considering growing your Windows instances without having to install Windows? It all comes within an Amazon EC2 image. After the image is spun up, you can be easily connect to your instance with a Windows Remote Desktop application from any operating system.
Windows application testing
Windows instances from Amazon are great for any Windows installer testing. Like a typical VMware image, an EC2 image can easily be discarded after use, which is important because some Windows applications leave too much left over in the registry. If you need to test Internet Explorer for your web front end tests or Microsoft SQL Server for your database backend, it’s all possible on Amazon EC2.
Saving installed applications
Just like Linux AMIs, you can install any packages, add software, and make system configurations. Easily save these changes to your new AMI image, which can be added to your Bamboo EC2 Image configuration.
Windows EC2 with Amazon and Bamboo allows for elastic growth to meet your demands. Don’t have enough VMWare hardware to go around? Expand your build system into the Amazon cloud, along with Bamboo’s elastic agents.
Want to get going on installing elastic agents on Windows/.NET? Check out a how-to blog on elastic agents and Windows.
There’s alot of “bling” flashing around, so Atlassian decided to make emails more “blingy”. There are many options to receive builds notifications in Bamboo – RSS, instant messenger, IDE pop-up, through Jira and email (the most popular). The goal of all these notifications is to digest the information you need quickly, so you can resolve any issues. The new email template makes it a whole lot easier to find important information about a build at a glance. Identify which test(s) failed, view code changes, and jump to the context of changes directly from the email. Not to mention, it looks and feels like the Bamboo UI.
Sensitive information’s now even more secure in Bamboo. Verify that remote agents are allowed to connect to the Bamboo server, and prevent unknown agents from connecting to the server. When Agent Security’s enabled, an administrator must manually approve agents before they can communicate with the server in any way.
This release has over 107 new features and improvements implemented. Check out the full release notes for more details.
The Bamboo Holiday Release is now ready for download – get started with a 30-day FREE trial or upgrade your current instance.
Or upgrade to Bamboo 3.4
You’ve been asking for it, the Bitbuket team has even joked about it – now it’s here (for real): for the one year anniversary of Bitbucket joining Atlassian, they’re announcing Git support.
All your source, all in one-place
Whether you are using Hg or Git, you can now keep all of your code in one place with your preferred DVCS format. If you have existing code you would like to migrate, you can easily import your Git, Mercurial or Subversion source code. Atlassian’s added a new importer for GitHub to our existing site importers which include SourceForge, Google Code and Codeplex.
Unlimited private and public repositories
A big advantage for Bitbucket users is the ability to have unlimited private repositories for free. This means you can store every line of code you’ve ever written in one place without paying a cent.
UI improvements have been happening gradually over the past six months:
Today’s release includes a new UI for the repository and user administration pages. A never-ending goal is to make Bitbucket easier to navigate and use the operations you need fast.
Pull requests, code commenting and key integrations with developer tools (Jira, Flowdock, HipChat, Twitter, Bamboo, Jenkins and more) have made this a feature filled year. And now Atlassian adds Git…
If you haven’t checked us out lately, Bitbucket has had a year of record growth – more than tripling the number of accounts since the acquisition, adding over 350 improvements, bug fixes and new features. Sign up now (no credit card required) and get unlimited private repos for free!
Were do I find the latest updates about Bitbucket?
Visit the Bitbucket blog at http://blog.bitbucket.org.
So, what’s new in Bamboo 3.1? Check it out this update from Atlassian:
1. Tasks replace Builders
We’ve replaced Builders with a more flexible and extensible concept called Tasks. Multiple Tasks can run inside the same Job sequentially with access to the same build directory. Previously, a Job was limited to one Builder – Ant, Maven, MSBuild etc. For anything more than just running a Maven Goal or executing an Ant Target, you were stuck with creating a script that performs a number of actions…until Tasks.
Package up your software and upload it to your website, continuously deploy new version on a QA server or even into a production environment. What you do with Tasks is completely up to you because Tasks are implemented as Plugins (and easy to write). Discover available Tasks and install them in your instance of Bamboo on the Atlassian Plugin Exchange.
All existing Builders have been converted to Tasks and tested (we recommend that you upgrade any custom Builders you may have).
2. Plan Variables and Parameterized Builds
You’ve always been able to specify global variables for use in your build configuration. However, all Plans shared these variables and only Administrators were able to create them, making it hard for individual projects to truly utilise this feature. To help maintain your builds with ease we’ve introduced Plan Variables. You can now specify variables that can be used in your build scripts and Tasks across Jobs in a single Plan.
Taking this a step further, we realized that during the development process there are times when you may want to run a build with customized parameters. These “special builds” can play an important part in the release and deployment process. Bamboo 3.1 allows you to parameterize your build when you manually trigger it and overwrite any Plan or Global variables that you’ve used in your build configuration.
3. .NET Support
With the re-work of Builders into Tasks we had the opportunity to improve upon Bamboo’s .Net Support, and we took it. We thank you for your feedback which helped us implement the following new features:
:: Visual Studio – Build Visual Studio projects devenv.exe.
:: Supports different architectures – x86, AMD64, IA32, IA64
:: MSBuild – Run MSBuild as part of your build
:: NAnt – Execute NAnt targets to build your project
:: MSTest Parser – Parses and displays MSTest test results
:: MBUnit Parser – Parses and displays MBUnit test results
:: NUnit Parser – Parses and displays NUnit test results
We’d love to know what you think about these new features and please tell us if there are any other improvements or .Net features you need.
4. Improved Bitbucket and GitHub Support
Bamboo 3.1 improves on the integration with Bitbucket and GitHub. When configuring your Bitbucket or GitHub repo simply enter your username and password and Bamboo will load the available repositories in a convenient dropdown from Bitbucket or GitHub.
5. Universal Plugin Manager (UPM)
Managing plugins and performing Bamboo upgrades are now much easier. The Universal Plugin Manager (UPM), already bundled with Jira and Confluence, is now bundled with Bamboo. The UPM allows you to:
:: Perform a plugin compatibility check before upgrading Bamboo.
:: Install new plugins from the Atlassian Plugin Exchange – like Community Tasks.
:: Manage existing plugins.
:: With just one click, upgrade all plugins that have updates available.
:: View and track updates via the audit log.
This means that we have the most experience working with Atlassian tools and have insight into new products, features, and beta testing. Through our profound knowledge of Atlassian environments and their intricacies, we can guide your organization as you navigate these important changes.
