6 reasons to switch off your legacy CI/CD onto Bitbucket Pipelines

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We’re hearing from more and more customers that they are considering a move from their legacy CI/CD tools. There is DevOps tooling fatigue. Too many tools, too much complexity, operational overhead, and distraction for developers. Companies are increasingly prioritizing the chance to consolidate tools. That said, we’ve also heard from many customers that there is inertia to invest in making this change. That this is something people know they need to do but they continue kicking the can down the road, due to a variety of factors such as competing priorities, perceived complexity, and more. This blog post gives you 6 reasons why you should switch from your legacy CI/CD vendor onto Bitbucket Pipelines, which is already included as part of your Bitbucket subscription.

Thinking about making the switch to Pipelines? Join our Pipelines community and engage directly with the Bitbucket Pipelines team.

1. Easier to manage

Managing CI/CD on premises poses a variety of challenges whether it’s dealing with hardware, upgrades, security configurations, patches, ensuring compatibility with other tools and systems, ensuring reliability and availability, minimizing downtime, and the list can go on!

Switching to Pipelines eliminates all of the toil of managing physical servers and most of the challenges of managing on-premises CI/CD. You delegate all of the maintenance to Atlassian, but maintain the ability to customize your workflow to the exact needs of your company via integrations and customizations.

2. Configurability made easy

Bitbucket Pipelines empowers you to custom tailor your CI/CD workflows to the exact needs of your organization with over 100+ out-of-the-box pipeline integrations (which we refer to as Pipes). Pipes enable you to slot technologies like AWS, GCP, Azure, Slack, Snyk, Datadog, and New Relic into your workflow. Pipes are easy to keep up to date because everything is config as code (there are no plugins to install or manage). Beyond what’s out-of-the-box, you can also easily develop custom Pipes for your organization. Learn more about Pipes.

3. Compliance at scale

Bitbucket Pipelines enables organizations to make compliance a core aspect of their CI/CD workflows.

Organizations can define company-wide policies, rules, and processes, and enforce them across every repository within their workspace, all from a centralized location. This ensures all teams using Pipelines are following company best practices and are compliant. See a demo on how to orchestrate CI/CD at scale.

Additionally, Bitbucket Pipelines offers granular control over permissions and access. You can control who has the authority to view, modify, or trigger pipelines, ensuring security and compliance with company policies.

And although we just talked about all the challenges of managing CI/CD on premises, we know not every company is fully ready to make the leap to 100% cloud. Some organizations need more control of the hardware, software, and the environment builds are executed into. With Bitbucket Pipelines you choose exactly where your CI/CD executes with the option to run builds on any combination of Atlassian’s fully-managed cloud platform, your own private cloud, or on-prem behind your firewall, so you get the best of both worlds across on-prem and cloud. Learn more about our runners.

4. Better experience for developers

As a native experience alongside Bitbucket repositories, CI/CD is a fully integrated part of your developers' workflow. This means developers save time and headache, and avoid switching back and forth between multiple tools. Developers also get real time visibility into the pipeline, with faster feedback loops, which can result in shipping value faster.

Furthermore, CI/CD configuration and workflows can be easily shared across repositories and even be managed at a workspace level so your developers can focus on writing code and never have to worry about managing a CI/CD pipeline.

5. DORA metrics

When you connect CI/CD into the Atlassian platform you get access to DORA metrics such as deployment frequency, cycle time, MTTR, and more so your teams can learn and improve with regard to velocity, performance, and quality. These metrics can populate in Compass, Jira, and Atlassian Analytics pulling from Bitbucket Pipelines. (Screenshot below highlights metrics in Compass).

6. Easy to get started

If you’re a Bitbucket Cloud customer, Pipelines is already included at no additional cost except for build minutes. Pipelines can be enabled from your repositories in just a couple clicks.

Furthermore, Bitbucket Pipelines uses the hierarchy that’s already part of Bitbucket Cloud (repo, project, workspace). This built-in structure aligns with the way teams organize their code and collaborate on projects, making it easier to integrate CI/CD directly into existing developer workflows.

Additionally, it’s easy to set up access control and permissions since Bitbucket Pipelines inherits them from associated repositories or workspaces.

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Ready to get started with Bitbucket Pipelines? We’re here to help!

Join our Pipelines community and engage directly with the Bitbucket Pipelines team.

[complexxl9]

On the contrary encountering all sorts of technical limitations and reading community posts, I have the impression that more people are considering switching off bitbucket pipelines (myself included).

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

@Josh Frank The first screenshot in this article shows a slightly different UI from the one we're using now (white-ish leftbar, light-mode on the build output panel, etc.).

Is there a facelifted Bitbucket Cloud UI coming?

[carlos_ijalba]

How do you enable DORA metrics? I have JIRA & BitBucket integrated already, and haven't seen them yet...

[Josh Frank]

@complexxl9 Sorry to hear that. If you're open to sharing, I'd love to hear more. Please feel free to reach out to me at jfrank@atlassian.com. 

[Josh Frank]

@carlos_ijalba When you integrate CI/CD with Jira, you should have the option to toggle on a "deployments" tab. In that tab, you can see deployment frequency and cycle time insights. You can also find more in-depth views on deployment frequency and cycle time in Jira reports. The specific screenshot on this post reflects metrics in Compass.

[Harry Edward]

Thank you for the detailed overview of the benefits of switching to Bitbucket Pipelines. The six reasons you’ve outlined are compelling, particularly the ease of management and configurability, as well as the compliance and security features. The native integration with Bitbucket, access to DORA metrics, and the simplicity of getting started make a strong case for making the switch. I appreciate the insights and will definitely consider joining the Pipelines community to engage directly with the team and learn more.