Is Bamboo suitable for deploying updates to 50+ customer servers?

[Scott Stevenson]

Is Bamboo suitable for deploying updates (the same build) to 50+ customer servers? And what would be the best approach to accomplish this?

[Jason Monsorno]

The build itself has options to save the build output as an artifact that is available further in the workflow and if you want archived and stored forever. Bamboo is pretty nice front-end for CI/CD workflows but it won't solve any of your deployment problems. You still need to be able to script it somehow and may want separate systems to do some of the heavy loading.

Inside of Bamboo there is the concept of local agents and remote agents. Local agents are more/less worker threads while remote agents are additional machines, both will allow you to do concurrent work like 50 deployments at once or chunked and you can decide what balance you want for time and perfomance metrics you need to acheive.

So it definitely suitable, the actual deployment itself you probably already have some script or automated process so plugging that it should be simple enough, the difficulty comes to any concurrency. Bamboo doesn't have any dynamic concurrency so you'll need to list each out or build a multi-threaded deployment yourself.

[Scott Stevenson]

Thanks Jason. Right now we are deploying to one staging server using an SCP (copy artifact to server) and SSH (run script to install artifact on server). Deployment task pictured in image below:

I am mostly wondering: What is the most logical way to expand this to deploy to an array of servers rather than a single server? Maybe just write one script that grabs the array of servers from an external server, and then iterates through them all? Or perhaps there is a plug-in that would make more sense?

[Jason Monsorno]

I would love a plugin for that, I haven't found one but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Personally I gave up the search and wrote my own, I have to deploy to 5 different Q&A sites on each build and of course no one wanted to wait so I have it multi-treaded with a reader-writer lock on the artifact, we store our artifacts outside of Bamboo as well.

[Iiro Niinikoski]

Hi guys, has anyone found any elegant way to configure the fleet of servers automatically...? It's starting to sound it will be some custom external scripting...

[Iiro Niinikoski]

...because who wants to manage SSH keys manually inside Bamboo....