Questions received from participants in the Elastic Bamboo presentation on the 18th March 2009.
Elastic Bamboo Questions
Q: Is there any concern about security? Does this require a public SVN repository?
A: Amazon provides fine grained control over access to elastic images via a firewall settings. Further, you have the ability to modify the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to implement a secure tunnel (SSL, SSH or VPN, for instance) to your own network.
Yes, you will need to make your source repository publicly accessible, and once again you will want to utilise SSL or similar authentication. For full details you may wish to read a recent Amazon whitepaper discussing security considerations and configuration.
Q: Does the cloud agent have access to the local network?
A: No, the elastic agent only has access to the Bamboo server via a secure tunnel. As the Bamboo infrastructure provides a tunnel between the Elastic agent process and the server you do not need to change inbound firewall rules. As mentioned above, you also have the option to configure your own VPN solution which would provide Elastic agents greater access to your internal network.
Q: Customising AMI's..
A: AMI is an Amazon Machine Image, from which an instance can be created. Bamboo provides one out of the box, based on Fedora. You can customize this image or create your own (the latter requires you to store it yourself with Amazon).
Pricing Questions
Q: Is it really only $8000 dollars?
A: Yes, Bamboo Enterprise licenses which include 25 remote agents are $8,000 and include 12 months of software maintenance and support. Full pricing details can be found here.
Q: How much does Elastic cost?
A: Elastic agents are the same as remote agents, only that they are deployed on Amazon EC2. As such they are licensed in the same manner as remote agents so you will need a Bamboo license which allows for enough remote agents as you have remote and/or elastic agents.
In addition to the Bamboo license fee you will need an account with Amazon for costs associated with your EC2 instances. Costs will vary depending on your choice of EC2 hardware, number of instances, uptime, storage, and so on.
Q: I'd like to ask why remote agents are limited to 25?
A: Bamboo Enterprise is limited to 25 remote agents this was simply an arbitrary number picked when 2.0 released. Since then, and with the introduction of Elastic Bamboo, we will be revisiting this to see how many customers are looking for more than 25 remote agents. If you are one of these people please let us know.
General Bamboo 2.2 Questions
Q: What if I am relying on an Archiva repository to get dependencies?
A: Similar to your source code repository this must be publicly available, or you must have a secure tunnel configured. Please see above for security considerations.
Q: Could you please elaborate on the new feature of 'same source code' for different builds? We have 30 plans and would like them all to build off one revision.
A: Previously dependent builds in Bamboo would obtain the latest revision from the repository. Bamboo 2.2 includes new functionality such that all child builds will utilise the same revision from the repository as the parent build. This ensures a consistent code base across dependent builds.
Q: Where are the physical build artifacts located? Where do the Maven artifacts get installed?
A: Just like a remote agent they will be built on the remote agent and then placed where specified in your build plan.
Q: Other than the freemarker template for emails, is there a tutorial to customize it?
A: You can find further information on the Bamboo Notification Templates page, including examples.