Managing Users Across Multiple Workspaces/ Projects in Bitbucket

[DocFredX]

Hi folks,

Thanks in advance.

Came here for advice in how we can best use Bitbucket in my organisation. I've tried to go in to much detail as I can. Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Goal

My organisation is currently in process of migrating to Bitbucket cloud and we are looking into how we can best manage user access in Bitbucket cloud.

Context

Our organisation has strict policies regarding access, lets say a developer working on project A will not have access to project B or any other project that are not under their scope. To elaborate on this further, the developer working on project A will have access to all repositories relevant to project A.

There are different development teams working on different projects, projects have their related code. Developers can be part of one or many teams and therefore have access to repositories belonging to one or more projects.

We also have external parties having access to our code, the same access policies will apply to them (i.e. projects and repositories related to their role will be accessible).

We are looking in to the option of having multiple workspaces for different teams to manage access to these different projects and thereby repositories.

For example, we will be having a separate workspace for our Front-end team and Back-end team. In reality we have larger number of teams and this number can increase along with the number of developers.

Problem

The problem we are facing is the challenge posed in managing multiple workspaces, does Bitbucket have features to manage all these workspaces at an organisational level?

If we proceed with setting up different projects across multiple workspaces, it seems that there will not be a central point of administration, as administration will be decentralised on to a workspace level.

This will be a problem when we have a large amount of workspaces and developers. For instance if a developer who has access to multiple workspaces leaves the organisation, revoking access can be cumbersome. The same issue can be faced when adding new developers to workspaces, as workspaces are decentralised granting access can be equally cumbersome.

Has your team faced an issue similar to this? How did you structure/ organise Bitbucket to best suit your needs?

Does Bitbucket have some management/ administration feature in its enterprise tier offerings?

Solutions Explored

One solution that we are thinking of is having a single workspace where we will have projects storing repositories belonging to each team, thereby configuring access on a project level.

[Syahrul]

Hey @DocFredX 

G'day!

This may be late, but just for your information Bitbucket cloud currently does not have a feature to manage multiple Workspace under organization.

The reason is that each Bitbucket user or billing is managed separately and does not share. Having multiple workspaces means you'll have to manage each separately and billing charge based on each Workspace, so you'll pay for the same user if the user has access to two workspaces.

I understand your user management complexity, so I suggest you create a single Workspace to manage user access via groups and projects.

• Organize groups for your repositories 

For example, you can multiple types of groups to which you can manage their access, group A has access to repositories a,b & c while group B has access to repositories b & d. Both groups will not see each other repositories that are restricted.

Also, with the new UI update of user management, it's now much easier to manage your user groups and access.

I hope this helps, let me know if you have any additional questions.

Cheers,
Syahrul