Compass is moving to beta!

[#1]

Today is a huge milestone for Compass - we’re officially in beta! Compass continues to evolve thanks to your continued usage, feedback and interviews, and since we moved to an open alpha our confidence that the need and desire for a product like Compass is stronger than ever before.

What does it mean to move to beta?

Compass moving to beta is all about confidence. Confidence within Atlassian that we’ve found something truly special with Compass, and a signal that we’ll begin our measured but eventual march towards general availability.

Moving to beta also means confidence for you, our users. Carrying an alpha tag brings with it questions about the longevity of the product. Is Compass worth trying when we don’t know if Atlassian will stop investing in it? Should a team set up a pilot project if it’s unstable or not certified/compliant? By moving to beta we hope this helps answer those questions and more like it - yes, you absolutely should!

And for the record, Compass is both SOC 2 compliant and ISO 27001 certified

You’ll notice any mention of alpha replaced with beta throughout the product, but from a product perspective nothing about the way we’ve been building Compass and collaborating with you changes. We’re still committed to helping you understand and improve your distributed software architecture and building a world class developer experience for your organisation. And we want to build Compass with your help - this is a product for you, after all.

Where are we today?

Since our last update we’ve made significant progress across our three core areas. We believe many of our core capabilities are reaching a relatively stable, useful state and we see customers continue to expand the use of Compass across their engineering teams.

You can read more about product capabilities in our documentation and guides, but here are some highlights of what Compass can do today.

The component catalog helps you track all the software components your engineering team builds and operates. You can use the catalog to:

• Create, import, and track different types of software components such as microservices or shared libraries, as well as data pipelines, machine learning models, websites, mobile apps, custom lambdas, APIs and much more.

• Add custom data about those components using both manual and automated means with API access to everything you add. This gives developers an intuitive, unified interface to find the information they need to use a given component or operate it in a secure, compliant, and healthy way.

• Search across this information using powerful filters and sorting to find groups of components or identify components that may require your attention. Smart Links in the Confluence & Jira editors make it easy to connect the dots across your tools and the pieces of your architecture it’s being applied to.

The DevOps health platform gives you a unique, scalable way to define, implement, and improve best practices across the entire software development lifecycle. This gives you a holistic view of the developer experience and helps you adopt a DevOps culture like moving testing, quality, and performance evaluations further left in your process. You can use this to:

• Give each DevOps team their own dashboard, providing insight into the components they own and visibility into their health and how they can improve them.

• Build custom scorecards to facilitate best practices and proactively manage component health and reduce incident severity and frequency

• Let Compass aggregate data and give your teams a weekly update they can use to review the operational status of owned components through our new CheckOps ritual.

The extensibility engine gives your engineering teams the control and flexibility they need to invest in and customise their developer experience. From workflow to tooling we know every company is unique and that’s why Compass was built to be developer friendly from Day 1. You can use this to:

• Access all the capabilities and data within Compass through our public GraphQL API, no ‘internal only APIs’ in sight. Automate as much as you want or wire up to your own custom toolchains.

• Leverage Forge, Atlassian’s serverless app development platform, to build fully-functional apps in a few hours and extend Compass.

• Integrations with Bitbucket, GitHub, Swimm, Swagger, CircleCI, and more available out of the box, making it easy to get started and automatically populate data. For example, the Bitbucket and GitHub apps automate key metrics such as Open Pull Requests, PR Cycle Time, or Deployment Frequency for any given service with a repository tied to it.

What's next?

Over the next 6-12 months we will continue our focus on helping solve the painful and complex problems customers are facing with their distributed software architecture and the teams that collaborate on them.

We’ll continue to improve on the 3 core areas and explore a few exciting new ones we can’t quite share yet (but stay tuned!). In the immediate future we’ll be working on search and dashboard improvements, more integrations, and providing teams a single, holistic place to build and operate the components they own. Other highlights include:

• Scorecard improvements: Adding customised data to scorecards, improving the global view to quickly find under-performing teams & components, and UX improvements to create and manage scorecards at scale effectively.

• Component overview re-design: We’ve added a LOT of new information to the component overview since we launched, so we’ll be making improvements to make it easier to understand and use.

• CheckOps improvements: Automating and aggregating the information your engineering teams need to make sound judgements and keep your architecture in a healthy state continuously. This means adding metrics, events, changes to components, highlighting outliers, improved actions, and notifications.

How much will Compass cost?

Compass will remain completely free to use as we move to beta and build confidence on our way to GA. Many of you have been asking about pricing and we have an early look at how we're thinking about pricing here: An early look at Compass pricing 

We’re just getting started

We’re excited to reach this new beta milestone and confident that Compass can help you build, customise, and deliver a world-class developer experience so that all of your engineers are happy, productive, and creative!

Look out for more updates here in the community and don’t hesitate to contact us if you have feedback or need advice. Looking to implement and rollout a new security scorecard? Want to track key metrics across your microservices? Want to talk team structures and ownership? We’re here to help!

[Ammar Ahmed Butt]

🤩

[Josh Martin]

This is great news! Part of what holds me back from having my team start using it is the pricing aspect- I don't want to invest time and energy into the product until I know how much it is eventually going to cost. However, I'm truly excited to see this big step forward.  Congrats, Atlassian! 

[Kelvin Yap]

@Josh Martin yep we hear you loud and clear! We'll have more information for you soon and happy to help with any questions you might have after that 😊

[Heikki Vesalainen]

Is Atlassian gathering any feedback from users? I would love to get some ideas into the development teams backlog regarding the component catalog side of the thing.

[sriprasanna.mg]

@Kelvin Yap Is there a plan for Compass to be available on-prem (datacenter) as well? If so is there a proposed timeline?

[Dave Parrish _Atlassian_]

@Heikki Vesalainen 👋 Yes, we are actively welcoming user feedback! The best way to get in touch is by clicking the "Give feedback" button at the top of your Compass screen. Or if you'd prefer, you can give feedback publicly by starting a topic here in Community. Either way, we'd love to hear your thoughts about the component catalog functionality.

[Taylor]

Hi @sriprasanna.mg, thanks for the question!

There is no plan for Compass to be available on-prem (datacenter). Atlassian's cloud products are getting better and more secure every day. Being a new product and Atlassian's focus on the cloud, we will be building out the product in Cloud for the foreseeable future.

We have lots of interest from some of our largest Enterprise clients re: Compass (makes sense as the complexity / sprawl problem only gets worse!) who are looking at using Compass in the cloud.

I should note that Compass can integrate with self-hosted tools and work quite well next to a combination of on-prem/cloud toolchains. 

Do you mind if I ask what your requirement is for on-prem? Is it size, performance, security, industry related? Would love any more context about your situation you can give to help us better understand how we might be able to support your use case.

Cheers!

[sriprasanna.mg]

@Taylor : Thanks for the response! We are a big enterprise who went all-in on Atlassian. Our policy definitions (security / industry) allows us to use only on-premise solutions at the moment. We have Jira sw, service desk, confluence, bitbucket all on prem for large scale usage.

We are looking into solutions like this HCL Accelerate: DevOps Value Stream Management Software - HCL Software (hcltechsw.com) or that Backstage Software Catalog and Developer Platform · An open platform for building developer portals on the topic of software catalog / dependency tracking / inter-product collaboration etc... 

Hence when I found out about compass - beta I was excited to see a possible solution fitting nicely in the Atlassian landscape we have. 

[Michael Alphonso]

@Taylor @sriprasanna.mg have you seen any movement with use of compass with data center version of products like jira, bitbucket. can we sign up for just compass.atlassian.net ? can we use the existing jira integration to pull linked-repositories etc. ?

[Joseph Shield]

@Michael Alphonso I reached out in their Slack today and they're still saying they don't support Jira/Bitbucket DataCenter, just that many people have asked. 

I'm trying to set it up anyways, by going to https://www.atlassian.com/software/compass and creating a... idk a "compass" instance, and then making teams and components manually. It's much more time consuming than the simplicity of linking a Bitbucket repository and Jira project, but hopefully I can set up some build hooks using their API to get the same result.

As to the jira integration, I can *link* to my on-prem Jira and Bitbucket from Compass, but it doesn't do any of the fancy integrations or setup for you.

For the record to Taylor's response above, my company is in the healthcare space and I can't imagine them ever moving from on-prem to cloud, despite how much I may wish they would.

[Valentina Mannara]

Hi everyone, is there any progress on the possibility of connecting Compass to enterprise DC instances of both Jira and Bitbucket/Bamboo? it could be an interesting tool for these types of customers

Thanks