What are possible advantages and shortcomings to moving from Bamboo Server installation to Bamboo Cloud? Would those depend on whether such a move happens prior or after moving both JIRA and Confluence to cloud as well?

[Sergei Jerdetski]

This question is in reference to Atlassian Documentation: Getting started with Bamboo Cloud

What are possible advantages and shortcomings to moving from Bamboo Server installation to Bamboo Cloud? Would those depend on whether such a move happens prior or after moving both JIRA and Confluence to cloud as well? 

[Steffen Opel _Utoolity_ · Accepted solution]

There are more, but here are the most relevant ones from my point of view (subjective accordingly):

Advantages

1. You do not need to install and maintain the Bamboo server and the underlying physical infrastructure.
   •  See shortcoming 2 below for a notable caveat regarding the also required Bamboo agents!

Shortcomings

1. Bamboo Cloud does not support third party add-ons, so most Bamboo add-ons listed in the Atlassian Marketplace won't be available to you (more specifically, all those that are not qualified as Preinstalled). You can read more about the background and state of affairs in our FAQ Will Tasks for AWS be available for Bamboo Cloud (Atlassian OnDemand)?:

   [...], Atlassian doesn't allow classic add-ons to be installed in their cloud offerings for security and scalability reasons, rather only those build with the new add-on framework Atlassian Connect - ironically Connect doesn't yet support Bamboo in turn, so we cannot do anything about it at this point and rely on Atlassian closing this gap first [...]

   Please watch/vote/comment on the following issue to raise awareness for this increasingly relevant limitation:

   • https://ecosystem.atlassian.net/browse/AC-1193
2. Bamboo Cloud does not support local (in-process) agents, so you are required to either configure elastic agents on Amazon EC2 or (as of recently) remote agents on a system of your choosing (refer to Difference between Local agents and Remote Agents for details).
   • For serious CI/CD scenarios, usage of local agents is not recommended anyway though (due to likely affecting the performance and stability of the Bamboo server itself), thus this shortcoming is easily ignored from that angle.
   • However, given one goal of a managed service is getting rid of the need to run anything yourself, the requirement to run elastic/remote agents yourself partially subverts a/the main argument for moving to Bamboo Cloud in the first place. Of course, provided you have an AWS account already, elastic agents are managed automatically by the Bamboo server once configured, so this is still considerably less overhead than maintaining the Bamboo server itself.