Bitbucket Simplifies Building CI/CD Pipelines with Pipes
At the core of the concept behind continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) lies the idea that your code is always in a shippable state, but there often remains a hindrance — the act of taking that code from your repo to your production server.
According to a recent survey by Atlassian, the average team uses 4.3 tools to move code from development to customer-facing production, which means there are several moving parts that teams have to get to work together. In response to the difficulties teams faced in completing the CI/CD lifecycle, Atlassian released Bitbucket Pipelines nearly three years ago. As the company noted at the time, “implementing continuous delivery is not easy.”
Despite building Bitbucket Pipelines, the company found that DevOps teams were still experiencing difficulties with integrating various tools and bringing code to production. According to Harpreet Singh, head of product at Bitbucket Cloud, the company’s recent survey found that more than 90 percent of respondents experienced difficulties with making tools work together. As a result, the company is releasing Bitbucket Pipes, which Singh says simplifies the process greatly.
“The new Pipes feature is a component of Pipelines that dramatically simplifies the process of setting up and automating a test and release pipeline with a plug-and-play UI for integrations,” said Singh. “Instead of writing scripts to set up pipelines, developers can choose from a list of supported integrations (AKA Pipes) to automate the creation of these pipelines and further augment existing pipelines with popular third-party tools.”
While Bitbucket Pipelines was initially released to address this problem, it was the interplay between different components that still presented complexity, and Singh likens this new product to individual pipes in a household.
“When setting up plumbing in your house you have to connect individual pipes in order to deliver water where it is needed,” said Singh. “Pipes have a similar relationship to Pipelines, you need to compile pipes together in order to create a fully automated CI/CD pipeline in Bitbucket Pipelines.”
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Currently, Bitbucket Pipes is launching with nearly three dozen pre-configured Pipes by companies like Microsoft, AWS, Slack, Google Cloud, and others, but Singh says that new ones are being developed daily. With Pipes, teams can easily link together different tools by copying and pasting YAML for each Pipe and then filling in the necessary fields. From there, updates and management of Pipes are handled by the author, rather than the team using it.
“Whether you’re creating a simple deploy pipeline to a hosting service like AWS, utilizing a multi-cloud deployment strategy, or automating a sophisticated pipeline that involves security scanning, monitoring, and artifact management, Bitbucket Pipes makes it easy to build and automate a CI/CD pipeline that meets your exact needs,” Singh writes in a blog post announcing Pipes. “Not only do supported pipes make it trivial to set up your external services across pipelines and repositories, but they’re also updated and maintained by the author meaning you never have to worry about updating or re-configuring them yourself. The end result is an easy way to build, update, modify, and maintain CI/CD pipelines no matter how sophisticated they are.”
Bitbucket Pipes are available immediately to all Bitbucket users who have enabled Bitbucket Pipelines.
Feature image via Pixabay.
