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Atlassian taps AWS, Sentry and Snyk for Bitbucket Pipelines

Atlassian has created a promotion around its Bitbucket Pipelines CI/CD platform to help developers gain access to tools that will help them turn out error-free code.

Atlassian has partnered with AWS, Sentry and Snyk to help developers build and ship error-free code at a quicker pace.

A new promotion built around Atlassian's Bitbucket version control repository hosting service will bring these partners together to help developers build, deploy and monitor their code faster, more securely and with fewer errors.

The promotion runs from March 30, 2020, through June 30, 2020, for Bitbucket users who upgrade to either the company's Standard or Premium plans. They will get three times the usual Bitbucket Pipelines minutes to up to 10,000 minutes per month. They'll also receive a $50 to $100 credit toward error monitoring with Sentry's error monitoring software, as well as unlimited security tests with Snyk on public and private Git repos and container images, the company said in a blog post.

The idea for this partnership came up when Sean Regan, head of product marketing at Atlassian, and Rahul Chhabria, director of product marketing at Sentry, met for beers at the Horseshoe Tavern in San Francisco to talk about how they could help developers to ship quality code faster, Chhabria said in an interview. They quickly decided that AWS and Snyk should be part of the partnership.

No single vendor can do it all

Atlassian has a strongly held belief that no single vendor will ever be able to deliver all developer tools end to end, Regan said in an interview.

"The idea that GitLab or Microsoft or someone is going to own and deliver every piece of the developer tool chain is not realistic in our mind," he said. "And so Atlassian believes very firmly in an open approach. We will work with every vendor in the developer tool space and make them integrate better together."

Indeed, GitLab and GitHub have cranked up their product portfolio's diversity, moving into areas like security, while Atlassian's approach is to support whatever customers use.

Thomas MurphyThomas Murphy

"As a whole, Atlassian has taken a position of, 'We support your choices in tools,' whereas GitLab and GitHub have stepped a bit more on their partners' toes currently," said Thomas Murphy, an analyst at Gartner.

This promotion also follows a common pattern of Microsoft and others of essentially having "free stuff" in the box, which was typically either a basic version of a tool or a time-limited trial of the full product. "This fills in areas that Atlassian has gaps compared to competitors in areas including security and error detection," Murphy said.

Meanwhile, Atlassian continues to build a strong partnership with AWS, while other large cloud providers have lined up with others. For example, Microsoft has ActiveX Data Objects and GitHub, while Google works with GitLab and also has some tools of its own. Amazon has a solid developer tools and services footprint, but it lacks in tools that enable developers to effectively manage their instances or manage requests for instances. But Atlassian has support in Jira Service Desk to manage AWS -- similar to the arrangement between ServiceNow and Azure.

Customers want more

Bitbucket Pipelines customers say they are happy with the product, but they see it as a start -- that it provides great basic capabilities but lacks support of greater pipeline complexity, said Chris Condo, an analyst at Forrester Research.

As a whole, Atlassian has taken a position of, 'We support your choices in tools,' whereas GitLab and GitHub have stepped a bit more on their partners' toes currently.
Thomas MurphyAnalyst, Gartner

However, those same users explained that even though they want the ability to support greater complexity, they've found that the cloud-based Bitbucket Pipelines helps them move much more quickly compared to their on-premises, bespoke CI/CD pipeline, he said.

"So, what that comes down to is they realize that they highly value speed," Condo said. "Speed to get new pipelines up and running, speed to crunch as many builds as needed, etc. They have discovered that in the cloud, they can do more with less."

Overall, Atlassian's strategy enables it to focus on the core platform and rely more on other players to round it out amid a drive to shift the user base to the cloud.

"While they continue to add to the [on-premises] editions, if they could get everyone onto the cloud platform it simplifies so many things: licensing is all subscription, single-code base, single set of training, docs, etc.," Murphy said.

Moreover, this Atlassian "bundle" is useful as people struggle with the shift to remote work because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Murphy said.

"We have seen an increase in calls around development and testing with how to support teams that are working remotely," he said. "This promotion goes through end of June, so it is a window of 'try and buy' at a time when people are looking at how cloud will enable them to be better able to work in a distributed fashion -- something everyone has 'known,' but now it has become real."

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