Atlassian – Modular Platform for Building an Integrated DevOps Toolchain

Atlassian offers an open ecosystem approach where a multitude of different vendors can be plug and play integrated together to achieve a single DevOps Value Stream.

devopsflow August 22, 2022

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This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Building an Integrated Toolchain

Atlassian is a stalwart of the DevOps industry, used by over 200,000 organizations worldwide.

They offer a suite of tools for automating the DevOps life-cycle, spanning from planning and collaboration through shipping code and service tracking, augmented by a third-party partner marketplace.

Integrated Toolchain

In the feature video the Head of DevOps Product Suzie Prince walks through what’s new with the suite.

From 4:00m Suzie focuses on the core message, the goal central to DevOps Flow, building an Integrated Toolchain. In other words it’s essential that each DevOps app doesn’t form yet another isolated silo, existing on their own as a standalone tool, but rather functions as a component part of an overall high performance value stream.

As Eric Billingsley writes on DevOps.com, the challenges developers face include poor interoperability between tools and manual handoffs causing DevOps automation silos, multiple test environments used through the process and the need for multi-cloud and hybrid deployments adding tons of unnecessary complexity, and increased policy and security requirements that simply cannot scale and remain manual.

Suzie states no one vendor can address this complexity and so a modular plug and play approach that integrates multiple vendors into a single value stream is the ideal solution. She describes how Jira can act as this integrating backbone with different vendors being plugged in to enable certain modular functionality, such that an idea, a commit, a branch or a bug-fix is linked to a Jira ticket, and end-to-end workflow is automated and visibility is laddered up to management in a consistent form.

A deep plethora of partners can be plugged in this way, to assemble the permutation of tool combinations best suited to your organizations needs, from Slack, Adobe, Invision through AWS, Zephyr, Datadog and Sentry can be switched on to enable functionality from early stage collaboration and planning through code deployment and monitoring.

As one example of a partner integration Applause announced a bi-directional integration capability so that application owners will be able to use a Jira project management application to create a ticket that requests a specific piece of code be tested or be sent to a tester that is a member of uTest, an online community of professional testers that Applause oversees.

Toolchain Capabilities

In this blog they suggest a catalogue of examples, organized by the major phases in the DevOps process, describing the capabilities required for each and what tools can be used to achieve them:

Phase	Capabilities	Tools

Plan	Continuously gathering user feedback, organizing it into actionable inputs, and prioritizing those actions for your development teams. Integrations and feature flags. Wherever you decide to scope your feature or project, it should be converted into user stories in your development backlog.	Jira Confluence Slack
Build	Production-identical environments for development. Infrastructure as code. Source control and collaborative coding.	Kubernetes Docker Ansible Chef Puppet Terraform Bitbucket GitHub Gitlab
Continuous integration and deployment	Continuous integration is the practice of checking in code to a shared repository several times a day, and testing it each time. That way, you automatically detect problems early, fix them when they’re easiest to fix, and roll out new features to your users as early as possible. Code review by pull-requests requires branching. Automatically apply your tests to development branches, and give you the option to push to main when branch builds are successful.	Jenkins AWS Bitbucket CircleCI Snyk Sonarsource Mabl Sauce Labs XRay Zephyr SmartBear
Operate / Monitor	There are two types of monitoring that should be automated: server monitoring and application performance monitoring. Software that is listening and recording data 24/7. Ongoing observability is a key capability for successful DevOps teams. Tools that integrate with your group chat client so alerts go straight to your team’s room, or a dedicated room for incidents.	App Dynamics Datadog Slack Splunk New Relic Opsgenie Pingdom Nagios Dynatrace Sumo Logic
Continuous feedback	Continuous feedback includes both the culture and processes to collect feedback regularly, and tools to drive insights from the feedback. Continuous feedback practices include collecting and reviewing NPS data, churn surveys, bug reports, support tickets, and even tweets. In a DevOps culture, everyone on the product team has access to user comments because they help guide everything from release planning to exploratory testing sessions. Look for applications that integrate your chat tool with your favorite survey platform for NPS-style feedback. Twitter and/or Facebook can also be integrated with chat for real-time feedback.	GetFeedback Slack Pendo Jira Service Management