The Bamboo on demand pricing options are based around the notion of paying for more build agents as you need them. Which is fine. There many projects, popular open source projects for example, where a significant group of developers would probably be happy to run a slave agent up on their PC and have that used to do the grunt work of the builds.
Could Bamboo be offered up in a hosted (on demand) but zero agents option? That way, development teams get a cheap and convenient Bamboo *web configuration interface*, which gets upgraded by Atlassian whenever there's a new version. Atlassian don't have to pay for cloud computing resources for running potentially intensive builds.
The pricing could still be targeted at number of slave agents; there will be an overhead of allowing hundreds of slave agents to constantly ping the central Bamboo server; and perhaps pricing based on the number of build jobs.
Projects could start off in this cheap mode of operation. If project owners find that builds are not running consistently across developers' PCs then they might be tempted to buy some cloud build server time. So, it's a strategy that allows Atlassian to offer a basic solution very cheaply and opens the door to further upgrade sales.
The other situation where this approach is applicable is the corporate environment. Companies like investment banks are not going to allow source code out of the building. At the moment, that means that they are forced to take the *download* option for Bamboo and run the whole thing locally. Could separating the web management console and the build agents mean that investment banks are happy to use the hosted verison of Bamboo but run all of the builds on the bank's hardware? Banks are always looking to reduce costs in areas that are not part of their core business. Running, maintaining and periodically upgrading a locally running Bamboo server definitely does not qualify as core business, so most IT managers would favour buying an Atlassian hosted (on demand) solution.
Anyway, just thought I'd put my thoughts about it down. I'd be interested to hear any comments.
You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in. Otherwise, register and sign in.