Q&A from Platform engineering webinar featuring Compass & Bitbucket

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Last month, we ran a webinar on Atlassian’s approach to platform engineering featuring Compass and Bitbucket. Thank you to those who attended live. For those who didn’t attend, here is the link to watch on demand.

In this webinar, we talked about Atlassian's platform engineering journey, the benefits we’re seeing and how you can use Compass and Bitbucket to help you along the way - from managing component catalogs to building custom code quality checks and readying CI/CD pipelines.

This post answers many of questions that you asked during the webinar. If you have further questions, please leave a comment.

To keep this concise, we’ve combined a few questions along the same theme.

Can Compass help a team create a new service based on a service template?

Yes, you can create new services in Compass via templates! It's the Templates feature in the top nav bar. You can create templates that include boilerplate code and CI/CD pipelines, preset information, and a webhook to be called when the template is used. Then use those templates to quickly create new software components and orchestrate the rest of your tools and systems. Here is the documentation.

What is the quick way to import components into Compass, our org uses Bitbucket repos, Jira and Confluence. Does Compass support mulitple Bitbucket workspaces?

You can import from Bitbucket (repos) or Jira (repos linked to projects) or CSV. Here is documentation on how to import.

And yes, Compass supports multiple Bitbucket workspaces. Learn more

Do I need to use Bitbucket? Does Compass work with Github or Gitlab?

Compass supports GitHub and GitLab as well. Here is a demo with Github.

Will there be future functionality to create scorecards based on number of Jira tickets that meet JQL criteria and a compass component is linked?

Love this idea - Jira metrics and scorecards are definitely on our radar. We can't say when we'll ship it but we plan to pursue it.

What are likely hurdles in rolling out a tool like Compass into a department that already has existing platform norms/approaches?

We recomment starting with one team - build the catalog, connect your repos, assign owners for each component, and build some scorecards as weekly ritual to track performance. Once that team starts seeing benefits, champion it across org e.g. present how compass improved things for your team. Show the before and after. This will encourage other teams to adopt Compass.

Can you provide any guidance on implementing a Compass Scorecard in a meaningful way?

Compass gives you some scorecards out of the box but you can build your own too. Watch this demo to learn how to build a customized scorecard for your team.

Have you integrated the people information in Compass to corporate directories. When people change roles/teams is it a manual update to compass?

Compass integrates with Atlassian Administration, which enables you to invite users to the Compass the same way you do with Jira and other Atlassian products.

Compass also integrates with Atlassian Guard, which connects Compass users to directories like Okta, Google Workspace, Azure Active Directory and others.

However, any updates regarding changes in roles or teams would need to be manually updated in Compass.

Is it possible to use Compass they way you showed us with Snyk but using a custom integration to send the vulnerability data to a Compass API of sorts? Does it have to go through app integrations only?

You can send metric data directly into Compass through the APIs without an integration. If you want something more robust, you could build a custom Compass app via our Forge platform.

Is there an API that can allow us to send data to Compass from tools that do not have plugins available? Like using another security scan tool other than Snyk?

Yes, the Compass API is fully open. It's really easy to send metric data into Compass. When you're looking at a metric inside a Compass component, Compass will generate the payload for you so you can copy it and add it into whatever scripts, CI/CD jobs, etc that you want to.

How would Compass work if you don't have any integration with other non-Atlassian tools, like Snyk (as shown in the demo)?

Compass is fully extensible. Whether you use the out of the box integrations or connect your own tools, you can build and develop integrations with Compass based on your need. You can also use webhooks and the APIs to send information into Compass without building an integration. Within Atlassian we have dozens of custom integrations built on Forge that we use to extend Compass.

Are there limitations to Compass benefits if using GitLab instead of Bitbucket?

We have an out of the box integration for GitLab. Right now the main functionality gap compared to Bitbucket is that we don’t support for Templates for GitLab yet. This is something on our radar so stay tuned for updates there!

Updating metrics in Compass is limited to 100 updates per hour. This is low. Do you plan to lift this rate limit significantly in the future?

If you're running into rate limiting issues, please reach out to the Compass Support team and we can help out.

What is your roadmap for integrations? We use Datadog and Sonarqube.

Datadog is a pretty frequent request. We don't have a timeline for shipping it yet. However, you can set up Datadog to send custom metrics and events to Compass, it's just not out of the box.

Does your CICD solution integrate with AWS only or can it do other clouds?

Assuming you're referring to our CI/CD solution that's available for customers (Bitbucket Pipelines). Pipelines has off-the -shelf support for all major cloud vendors, AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Beyond hosting providers, we have 100+ built-in connectors called Pipes to help you build an end to end delivery workflow by integrating testing, security tools and more. Learn more

Which custom checks have been most impactful to add to your pipelines? How do you weigh increased time to build vs benefit from additional checks?

We have a whole range of custom checks that we apply to maintain compliance with the various regulations and standards we have to keep up with.

We find that checks make the process faster because once built, they are automated in that when the check fails, it automatically alerts the user and can block the merge, if you choose to enforce it. It helps maintain code quality at scale without having to constantly remind teams to follow compliance rules.

To enable custom merge checks in Bitbucket, do we need Forge?

Custom Merge checks are executed on Forge, but there's nothing you need to do in order to get access to Forge, it's baked in to all the cloud products by default. We have a step-by-step tutorials and extensive documentation. And there is no additional cost for using Forge. Learn more

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Missed the webinar? Tune in to the recording.

We hope this answered many of your questions. If you have other questions, please leave a comment here.