Why does bamboo not recognize image identity when limiting elastic instances?

Andy Longshaw October 10, 2012

We have just been building some EC2 server images for Windows/VS2012 CI servers triggered through bamboo (see http://davidstringeratwork.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/using-atlassian-bamboo-ondemand-for-visual-studio-2012-projects-part-1/). We built an AMI image of the CI server and configured bamboo to launch that when we committed to GITHub.

We encountered a problem when we added some other, non-transient instances to help with specialist testing. At that point, our automated CI builds would no longer trigger. We were helped out by the support folks to identify that the problem related to the "number of elastic instances on your AWS account that are not controlled by Bamboo does not exceed" setting in the bamboo configuration. Once we had some more running instances we had exceeded this value so bamboo would not launch any more instances, even though the instances were for different purposes.

The question is this: should this bamboo configuration setting not just relate to instances started from AMI images are launched by bamboo rather than all instances regardles of the AMI from which they originate? Is there something we are missing here in terms of a problem the current behaviour is solving that we haven't encountered yet?

Thanks

Andy

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Przemek Bruski
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
October 10, 2012

The question is this: should this bamboo configuration setting not just relate to instances started from AMI images are launched by bamboo rather than all instances regardles of the AMI from which they originate?

It's a failsafe measure. Some cases to consider:

  • you upgrade your Bamboo and get new stock images, your old instances are still running
  • you remove some AMI configurations from Bamboo
  • you kill your other Bamboo instance and have no warning that some old instances are still running
Andy Longshaw October 11, 2012

Could I propose this as a feature? If so, how do I best do this? Do I need to leave this as an open question for it to be considered?

Andy Longshaw October 11, 2012

Interesting. For our own current purposes (running CI servers) I would never think of running a stock image but I can see that for people who do use stock images rather than custom that this could be an issue. Even so, I think that all of these cases woudl be improved if there was a way of telling bamboo (or bamboo working it out) which image types it can (or has been able to) launch and only including these in the count.

Przemek Bruski
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
October 11, 2012

You can open an improvement at our public issue tracker: jira.atlassian.com

Andy Longshaw October 16, 2012

OK. Thanks. Will do this and close the question.

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