Peter Leschev presented on how the Build Engineering team at Atlassian scaled their continuous integration infrastructure to handle a massive increase in builds from 21k per month to over 150k per month. Some key things they did were adopting infrastructure as code practices with Puppet, building stateless build agents, monitoring Bamboo servers, and using tools like Packer, Terraform, and self-service portals to improve reliability and developer experience at scale.

1. PETER LESCHEV • TEAM LEAD • ATLASSIAN • @PETERLESCHEV
Build Engineering @ Atlassian:
Scaling to 150k builds per month & beyond
PuppetConf 2015

2. TEAM
INTRODUCTION
INFRASTRUCTURE
BAMBOO SERVERS
Introduction
CONCLUSION

3. Build platform & services
used internally within
Atlassian to
build, test & deliver
software

4. Developers expect a
reliable infrastructure
& fast CI feedback

5. • 12 Bamboo Servers
• maven.atlassian.com / 9 Nexus instances / 9 TB
• 7 Nexus proxies for internal traffic
• Monitoring
• opsview, graphite, statsd, newrelic, datadog
Build Engineering today @ Atlassian
• 1200 build agents on EC2
• include SCM clients, JDKs, JVM build tools, databases, headless
browser testing, Python builds, NodeJS, installers & more
• Maintain 20 AMIs of various build configurations

6. 4 years ago:
Builds per month
21k

7. Last month:
Builds per month
186k

8. Build Engineering @ Atlassian

10. JIRA alone has
Automated tests
49k

12. 3 stories of gaining
maturity to handle
Atlassian growth

13. INTRODUCTION
TEAM
INFRASTRUCTURE
BAMBOO SERVERS
Team
CONCLUSION

14. History of
team roles

15. Individual
Engineers
Information silos
Fault investigation, requests for
advice, unplanned work
Little project work
Very interrupt driven
Duplication of effort
Limited to customer driven changes

16. Disturbed role
Knowledge Transfer
when switching between project /
disturbed roles is difficult
More project work
Non-disturbed can focus on larger tasks
Context switching
Reduction in duplication of effort,
promotes collaboration within the team
2 week rotation

17. Team expands
Build Engineers

18. Team expands
Build Engineers

19. Team expands
Infra Engineers
Developers
Build Engineers

20. Disturbed for
Dev & Infra
Too interrupt driven
To encourage knowledge transfer
between infra & dev
Staggered changeovers
Minimising disruption due to context
switching
Disturbed pairing
Couldn’t handle smaller customer
raised requests & interrupt driven
work

21. Supporting
Developers
team channel

22. Supporting
Developers

23. Supporting
Developers

24. 1. Measure the pain
2. Continuous Improvement

25. Technical Debt

26. Technical Debt

27. Contact Rate
+ Confluence Questions
+ Hipchat queries
Customer JIRA issues
Number of Developers
( )
÷
=

28. Contact Rate

29. The Shield
http://www.clker.com/cliparts/e/d/c/4/11970889822084687040sinoptik_Medieval_shield.svg.hi.png

30. Rebranding Maintenance
Disturbed
Removing the negative attitude
towards the old role within the team

31. Project
work
Maintenance
The Shield

32. How do we avoid this in the future?
PETER LESCHEV
“ ”

33. Fix it now,
fix it for the future

34. Self service

35. Chat bots
Self Service

36. Self Service
Maven Self Help Tool

37. INTRODUCTION
INFRASTRUCTURE
TEAM
BAMBOO SERVERS
Infrastructure
CONCLUSION

38. Infrastructure as Code
= Puppet + SCM ?

39. 4 years ago…
Started using Puppet
Manually maintained
snow flakes

40. Production rollout
puppetmaster
build agents

41. Production rollout failure
puppetmaster
build agents

42. Low confidence
of change

44. atlassian.com/git

45. Style in Pull
Requests

46. Puppet Lint
https://github.com/rodjek/puppet-lint
Tim Sharpe
@rodjek
Runs checks & posts results, fails if
there are any warnings or errors
Automated Build
Automated Style
Checking

47. • Coding on Puppet Master
• Culture of manually modifying production - Configuration Drift
• Impact on Builds
Using Staging for Development
puppetmaster
build agents
staging puppet environment

48. Vagrant
www.vagrantup.com
Mitchell Hashimoto
@mitchellh
Packer
packer.io

49. Rolling out to staging
Rolling out to production
Broken build agents
Developing locally

50. Behaviour Driven Development
Cucumber
https://github.com/cucumber/aruba

51. But it works on my machine
EVERY DEVELOPER
“ ”

52. Continuous Integration
‘From scratch’ provisioning
Confidence that you can rebuild in disaster

53. The Pets: you give nice names, you stroke
them, and when they get ill, you nurse them
back to health, taking a long time over it.
“
”
The Cattle: you give them numbers. When
they get ill, you shoot them TIM BELL, CERN

54. Provisioning from
scratch is slow

55. Profiling Puppet Runs
Add “--evaltrace” to puppet apply
+ =
Collect and show the
longest occurrences of:
“Evaluated in ([d.]+) seconds”

56. Profiling Cucumber runs
http://itshouldbeuseful.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/find-your-slowest-running-cucumber-features/

57. • Faster local provisioning
• Different class of problems found
• Closer to production
Delta Provisioning
‘from scratch’ provision ‘delta’ provision
provisionVM
exportVM fileshare
importVM box
provisionVM
on success

58. Broken builds
master

59. Branch builds
BUILDENG-5670
BUILDENG-5669
master

60. Infrequent Releases

61. • Puppet runs impacted running builds
• Disabling all the build agents
• Manually performing the roll out
• git clone / librarian-puppet / symlink update on puppetmaster
• Kick off puppet on all the build agents
• Enabling all the build agents
• Set of Puppet environments for every Bamboo server
Painful Puppet Rollouts

62. Graceful Service restarts
+
Bamboo Agent JVM process watches
for touch file & shutdowns when Idle
(written as a Bamboo Plugin)

63. Puppet environments
reduced
staging
production
server1_staging
server1_production
server2_staging
server2_production
server3_staging
server3_production
etc

64. Bamboo Deployments
Available agents
Available agents Destination server
TASK 1
TASK 2
Task list
1.3
Build results
(Artifacts)
Release Environments
Repository Build artifacts Release
1.3
Build results
(Artifacts)
Release
1.0
1.3
1.3
Build results
(Artifacts)
Release Environments
Production
Development
1.0
1.3
1.3
1.3
Build results
(Artifacts)
Release Environments
Production
Development
1.0
1.31.3
Production
Development
1.31.3
Development
Repository Build artifacts Release
How artifacts work
1.3
1.0
1.31.3
Production
Development
1.31.3
Development
Release notes
Repository Build artifacts Release
staging
production
1.3
Build results
(Artifacts)
Release Environments
Repository Build artifacts Release
1.3
d results
rtifacts)
Release Environments
sitory Build artifacts Release
1.3
Build results
(Artifacts)
Release Environments
Repository Build artifacts Release
build
• git clone
• librarian-puppet
• to specific environments
• scp to puppet master &
symlink update
test deploy
• ‘delta’ & ‘from scratch’
vagrant provisions
1.3
Build artifacts Release
build & test AMIs
• Generated using Packer
• AMIs on Bamboo Servers updated
deploy AMIs

65. Puppet Build, Test & Deploy Pipeline

66. Puppet Build, Test & Deploy Pipeline

67. Terraform
Pipeline
Plan & Apply changes
of staging & production environments
terraform.io

68. ‘open prs’ Bot

69. Less human effort
through automation
=
Increased frequency
& reliability of releases

70. Snowflakes
Pets
Cattle
Stateless Machines

71. Infrastructure
consistency is key

72. Challenges
introduces instability
Lots of packages
Large number of constantly updating
package dependencies
External dependencies

73. INTRODUCTION
BAMBOO SERVERS
TEAM
INFRASTRUCTURE
Bamboo Servers
CONCLUSION

74. At scale is hard

75. Bamboo Servers
12

76. Build Plans
3500

77. Plan Branches
14k

78. Bamboo is great,
but hard to manage at scale

79. Build Configuration
as code

80. Plan
Templates
Bamboo Plugin:

81. Plan
Templates
Checked into SCM
Bamboo Plugin:
Reusable snippets
changes can be code reviewed
Export plans for backup, or move to
another Bamboo instance easily
Bulk changes
Export existing plans
Update 100s of job requirements with
a single commit

82. Pushing Bamboo
to its limits

83. Agent Smith
Wallboard
Bamboo Plugin:
Trend data sent to Graphite
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.bamboo.plugin.agent-smith-wallboard

85. Add metrics,
then alert on them

86. Bamboo
Monitoring
Plugin
Metrics to graphite
Bamboo Plugin:
Bamboo Health
ActiveMQ, Database connections,
Tomcat, JVM Memory usage.
Background thread workers. Number
of plans / plan branches, plans / plan
branches for deletion.

88. When a Bamboo
Server starts
misbehaving…

89. Infrastructure differences?
Is it Bamboo Configuration?
Is it a Bamboo Plugin?
Is it Bamboo the product?
How is it being used?

90. Infrastructure consistency
of Bamboo Servers is key

91. Bamboo
Puppet
provider
+
REST API for Administration
Bamboo Puppet Provider
REST calls
https://forge.puppetlabs.com/atlassian/bamboo_rest

92. Bamboo
Puppet
provider
https://forge.puppetlabs.com/atlassian/bamboo_rest
Hipchat Notification
Managed via Puppet

93. Bamboo Plugins
‘Continuous Plugin Deployment’ Task
This text box is not intended to
contain a bunch of copy.
1-click upgrades of
Available agents
Available agents Destination server
TASK 1
TASK 2
Task list Available agentsTask list
Task list
Production
Available agents Destination server
TASK 1
TASK 2
Task list
How artifacts work
1.3
1.0
1.31.3
Produc
Developm
1.31.3
Development
Release notes
Repository Build artifacts Release
How artifacts work
1.3
Build results
(Artifacts)
Release Environments
1.0
1.31.3
Production
Development
1.31.3
Development
Release notes
Repository Build artifacts Release
How artifacts work
1.3
1.0
1.31.3
Production
Development
1.31.3
Development
Artifacts
Ve
Test &
Build
JIRA
issue
Commit TriggerCode
Release notes
Repository Build artifacts Release
All Bamboo Servers
How artifacts work
1.3
Build results
(Artifacts)
Release Environments
1.0
1.31.3
Production
Development
1.31.3
Development
Repository Build artifacts Release
build
Deploy
How artifacts work
1.3
1.0
1.31.3
Production
Developmen
1.31.3
Development
Repository Build artifacts Release
build & test AMIs
Build
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.bamboo.plugins.deploy.continuous-plugin-deployment

94. Bamboo Servers
1-click upgrades of
Using scp / ssh & puppet
Available agents
Available agents Destination server
TASK 1
TASK 2
TASK 1
TASK 2
Task list Available agents
TASK 1
TASK 2
Task list
Task list
Production
Available agents Destination server
TASK 1
TASK 2
Task list
How artifacts work
1.3
Build results
(Artifacts)
Release Environments
De
1.0
1.31.3
Production
Development
1.31.3
Development
Repository Build artifacts Release
How artifacts work
1.3
1.3
1.3
Build results
(Artifacts)
Release Environments
Development
1.0
1.31.3
Production
Development
1.31.3
Development
Release notes
Repository Build artifacts Release
How artifacts work
1.3
1.0
1.31.3
Production
Development
1.31.3
Development
Artifacts
Versio
Test &JIRA
Release notes
Repository Build artifacts Release
How artifacts work
1
1.3
1.3
Build results
(Artifacts)
Release Environments
Development
1.0
1.31.3
Production
Development
1.31.3
Development
Repository Build artifacts Release
Upgrade Bamboo
1.3
1.0
1.31.3
Production
Development
1.31.3
Development
Repository Build artifacts Release
Build Bamboo
1.3
Build results
(Artifacts)
Release Environm
D
Repository Build artifacts
1.0
1.3
1.3
1.3
Build results
(Artifacts)
Release Environments
Production
Development
Repository Build artifacts Release
jira-bamboo
servicedesk-bamboo

95. Infrastructure differences?
Is it Bamboo Configuration?
Is it a Bamboo Plugin?
Is it Bamboo the product?
How is it being used?

96. TEAM
INFRASTRUCTURE
BAMBOO SERVERS
Conclusion
CONCLUSION
INTRODUCTION

97. Constant improvement

98. We’ve matured to handle
the growth of Atlassian

99. Come join us!

100. Thank you!
PETER LESCHEV • TEAM LEAD • ATLASSIAN • @PETERLESCHEV