Atlassian Server end-of-support pushes migrations forward
Starting February 15, 2024, Atlassian will stop providing technical support, security updates, and vulnerability fixes for its Server products, including Bitbucket Server and Bamboo Server. With that deadline approaching, GitHub has rolled out new migration tooling to ease transitions from those Atlassian tools to GitHub Enterprise Cloud and GitHub Actions.
GitHub Enterprise Importer (GEI) now supports migrations from Bitbucket Server and Bitbucket Data Center to GitHub Enterprise Cloud. Separately, GitHub Actions Importer now covers all of Atlassian's CI/CD products—Bitbucket, Bamboo Server, and Bamboo Data Center—for moves to GitHub Actions.
Why teams are consolidating their toolchains
Developer toolchains have grown increasingly fragmented, with disparate products that don't always integrate cleanly, creating operational overhead and a disjointed experience. Despite broad investment in DevOps, developers report that their most time-consuming activity outside of writing code is waiting on builds and tests. Security concerns around coordinating workflows across multiple tools are also frequently cited.
Consolidating onto a single integrated platform can improve the developer experience, with research suggesting that investing in developer experience correlates with revenue growth. GitHub positions its platform as that consolidated environment, serving over 100 million developers and offering built-in CI/CD via GitHub Actions, collaboration features, embedded application security testing, and GitHub Copilot.
New repository migration path: Bitbucket Server and Data Center
GEI is the migration tool GitHub has used to help thousands of customers move more than 700,000 repositories. Today's release extends GEI to Bitbucket Server and Bitbucket Data Center, covering code, pull requests, reviews, and comments.
With GitHub Enterprise Importer, we were able to migrate hundreds of repos from BitBucket Server to GitHub Enterprise up to 70% faster than we could have otherwise.
To migrate a repository, users install the extension for the GitHub CLI and run the gh bbs2gh migrate-repo command. The GitHub Docs include guidance on planning migrations and moving large numbers of repositories.
Moving CI/CD pipelines alongside repositories
GitHub Actions Importer addresses the pipeline side of the migration. It already supported Azure DevOps, CircleCI, GitLab, Jenkins, and Travis CI; Bitbucket and Bamboo are now added to that list. The tool helps organizations plan, forecast, and automate CI migrations, and since its launch it has supported evaluation and testing of nearly a quarter million pipelines.
GitHub Actions Importer breaks migration into three phases:
- Planning. Analyze existing CI/CD usage to build a migration roadmap.
- Testing. Run dry-run migrations to verify converted workflows behave like the originals. Unlimited iterations are supported to capture custom behavior in the new GitHub Actions workflows.
- Migration. Generate validated workflows and open pull requests to add them to the repository. Remaining constructs that couldn't be migrated automatically must be reviewed and handled manually.
Documentation and a learning environment called Importer Labs—with tutorials for each supported migration path—are available for teams getting started. With both the importer tools now covering Atlassian's DevOps products, GitHub is making the case that moving off Bitbucket Server and Bamboo Server before Atlassian's support cutoff is now a more practical option.
