Atlassian Bitbucket Cloud Sets Enterprise DevOps Path

Atlassian is expanding the capabilities of its Bitbucket Cloud code hosting and version control service to better support large enterprises.

Like competitors GitHub and GitLab, Bitbucket uses the Git version control system as the foundation for enabling developers to collaborate on DevOps efforts. With its latest efforts, Atlassian is looking to provide its enterprise users with more capabilities that improve security, integration, administration, and scalability.

"The focus for Bitbucket hasn't historically been totally on enterprise like this," Atlassian Head of Bitbucket Engineering Daniel Tao, told ITPro Today. "So that has really been a shift in our strategy to focus really on supporting all these customers who might be looking at migrating their source code to the cloud and they're not sure what tool is right for them."

The 'diff' in Atlassian's Bitbucket Cloud DevOps Features

Among the most useful capabilities for DevOps professionals is being able to identify the difference between one block of code and another, using a command known as "diff."

As part of its push to expand enterprise support, Bitbucket Cloud has rewritten its diff algorithm, which is the underlying technology that enables users to see how code has changed, Tao said. The previous diff algorithm that Bitbucket used didn't scale for large customers, making it difficult for those organizations to understand code changes, he said.

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Bitbucket-Cloud

Another important new capability that is coming soon to Bitbucket Cloud is enforced project settings. That feature will help enterprises set project configurations and policies, such as the default set of code reviewers, build restrictions, and access.

"These are policies to ensure that all of your teams are meeting the same compliance and security criteria that you have set out at an organizational level," Tao said. "We're rolling out the ability to define that once and enforce it across all your repositories."

Doubling Down on Security and Compliance for Atlassian's Bitbucket Cloud

Security is also a primary area of focus for Atlassian as it scales up Bitbucket Cloud for larger enterprises.

Tao noted that Bitbucket Cloud now provides encryption at rest, meaning that code data can be encrypted in storage. Audit logs have also been added to the platform, enabling DevSecOps and security teams to see access patterns to identify potential issues.

In addition, Atlassian has integrated with security vendor Snyk to provide vulnerability scanning for Bitbucket code repositories. Bitbucket Cloud premium customers get Snyk's scanning capability as part of the service, Tao said.

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For compliance with data residency regulations, Atlassian is building out its Bitbucket Mesh capabilities that enable a distributed storage layer. Without the mesh, if an organization has source code stored in Bitbucket Cloud, all that code is serviced from a single file system that could be accessed by thousands of developers, Tao said.

"What Bitbucket Mesh brings is replication of your source code across multiple nodes and the ability to distribute that traffic," he said. "The larger the team, the more we can replicate that data across more and more file systems."