Deprecation of Local Agents

[Marius Herrmann]

Hello everyone, we recently upgraded to Bamboo DC 9.3 and in that upgrade, we found out that local agents are no longer supported and that they will be removed "in a future release".

Right now, we still are mostly using local agents, so we will have to migrate to remote agents before that happens.

Is there already roadmap or timeline when that will take place?

Thanks a lot

[Eduardo Alvarenga · Accepted solution]

Hello @Marius Herrmann@Marius Herrmann,

Welcome to Atlassian Community!

As of this date (23/10/2023), no published roadmaps aim to retire Local agents. Switching to Remote, Elastic or Ephemeral Agents is recommended as soon as possible to prepare for a future decision and adjust your Bamboo instance to the Data Center.

If you have workloads that require direct interaction with the Bamboo Server, you can always install a Remote Agent on the same host as the Bamboo Server. That way, you'll have a separate Java process with access to the exact location as the original Local Agents.

Remote agents depend on the License Pool your Bamboo instance has, so please consider your license count as part of your planning.

Sincerely,

Eduardo Alvarenga
Atlassian Support APAC

--please don't forget to Accept the answer if the reply is helpful-- 

[Gordon Churchill]

Hi Eduardo, I posted a similar question but found your answer right after posting. My client uses local agents for the reason you stated. They would have stayed with Bamboo Server had it still been available as they have no reason to use most Data Center features. I understand the reasoning in trying to push customers to buy more agent licenses but frankly this has the potential to push customers to Jenkins or GoCD, etc. instead. Even if customers are only buying the minimum 5-remote agent license, at least they're still customers. If Atlassian needs to raise prices to cover costs, maybe make the 5-remote a 10-remote minimum, but removing unlimited local agents will likely be a deal breaker for many. Please forward this feedback to sales.  

[Danilo Fiorenzano]

Well, apparently, a future that could not be foreseen is now here - Bamboo DC 9.6 no longer supports local agents at all. Leaving this here in case someone else lands on this thread later.

[Gordon Churchill]

Thanks! I was about to do an upgrade to 9.6.

I will now not be upgrading my org past 9.5.  If the security issues become a problem we'll be forced to switch to another product/move back to Jenkins. Not my preference but customers vote with their wallets, as they say. 

[Martyna Wojtas]

@Marius Herrmann @Gordon Churchill thank you very much for your feedback! 

The main reason for deprecation of local agents was their negative impact on performance (e.g. eating up memory) and security (e.g. possibility of arbitrary code execution) as both of these problems should be avoided in enterprise-grade software. This is why we deprecated the local agents when introducing  Bamboo Data Center. However, we are aware that many of our customers have reasons for including local agents in their tool-chains, so we have been waiting with their removal. After listening to enough feedback we’ve decided against removing them in the foreseeable future. They will remain unsupported and we will keep advising against their usage.

[m]

I regret Atlassian has decided for their clients and removed the local agent feature instead of leaving it as an option.

I presume the real reason is higher licensing tiers clients may have to consider now that local agents are not available.