Transcript: The Atlassian Ecosystem Podcast Ep. 129 - Restrain the GitKraken

Ryan Spilken:
Hello, and welcome to the Atlassian Ecosystem Podcast. This is episode 129, Restrain the GitKraken. I'm your host, Ryan Spilken and joining me today in order to hold back the many arms of the beast are Brenda Burrell and Matthew Stublefield. Brenda, Matthew, good day.

Brenda Burrell:
Greetings.

Matthew Stublefield:
Good to see you both.

Ryan Spilken:
Well, before we get to the Eldritch Abomination that is the GitKraken news with BitBucket. We'll start as we always do with the Atlassian Cloud updates. These are covering from the 27th of September to the 12th of October. And of course, you'll get links to these notes in our transcript. Let's start with the Atlassian Cloud platform. Where now you're able to create a mobile app management policy. Admins can now configure security controls for users, iOS or Android devices, clipboard restrictions, data protection, device security, and such, by creating a mobile app management policy. Now, you have to be an Atlassian access subscriber to do this. This could be a requisite feature for some enterprise users out there. I could see it being quite handy.

Matthew Stublefield:
Yeah. Actually years ago I was working with a multinational firm that wanted this exact thing. They wanted to prevent people from copying and pasting stuff on their phone, or downloading certain things. And we looked at creating a custom app to do that. And there just wasn't an actually secure way to do it. It's like we could hide buttons or things like that, we'd still potentially be able get around it-

Ryan Spilken:
Yeah, because it's all.

Matthew Stublefield:
Yeah, getting compliance with a security policy that says, "We don't want this data to be portable" Really hard in the Atlassian space. Atlassian doing this on cloud is fantastic. This is really powerful and it's going to make some large enterprises. This is the type of feature where you go, "Ooh, I don't know that the cloud is secure enough." Then you go, "Oh shit. Cloud is more secure than my data center, because I can't do this on data center." That's pretty neat.

Ryan Spilken:
Well, it's a combination though, of cloud and server sides or client side stuff. Like the actual iPad is going to have to be a company managed one, right? Because if you pull up Jira through Safari on an iPad.

Matthew Stublefield:
Yeah. That is a question here of, so it's mobile app management. Presumably this is referring to your access through the apps, not through the mobile web browser, which comes in should be spoofed. That said, if you already have... Yeah, you're raising some questions for me now. You're raising some questions for me now, because-

Ryan Spilken:
I see what you're saying and I think it's definitely, but because those devices are so user centric, if it's not a heavily regulated device.

Matthew Stublefield:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. It makes me want to find some way to connect with the Jira platform product manager or whoever, the Atlassian platform to talk with us more about that. I don't know, Ryan, if that's something you put on your plate there. But if you got nothing else going on maybe we can track that person down.

Ryan Spilken:
Oh, Matthew, you crack me up sometimes.

Brenda Burrell:
Only sometimes.

Matthew Stublefield:
Not that time now, that's BS.

Ryan Spilken:
Maybe we can reach out to our colleagues over there at Atlassian and we'll see what we can do. We've got some people who know some people. All right. Over in the Jira platform, you are now able to save your search criteria with filters. We actually had to go round about this for a little while before we recorded today, because it was a little confusing. What this comes down to is that they're moving the save filter UI into the project issue list. So when you move into the sidebar menu within a project that says issues, and then you define a search with either basic search or JQL, they will then include a save button, which will allow you to save that search. Whereas previously, that was only done through the issues menu.

Matthew Stublefield:
And to be clear, they're not moving it, it will still be there in the issues menu. If you can conduct a search you'd be able to save that as a filter. They're just adding it-

Ryan Spilken:
Adding. Yeah

Matthew Stublefield:
... to the view when you're looking at project issues. So you modify it in some way, and then you'll be able to save that also. What I'm curious to see is, in that left sidebar, right now there's a number of default filters shown, if your custom filter for that project will display in that left sidebar as well? I think that'd be nice, but this feature is rolling out. It is not available on any of our cloud instances yet. So we'll just have to wait and see.

Ryan Spilken:
Moving on to Jira Software, you are now able to roll up dates on your roadmap. So the project managers and the two of you are probably a little tickled by this, right? You can now infer dates of epics based on those of its child issues in roadmap view. So, if an epic has three stories that each last one sprint, your roadmap view will automatically schedule the epic to last three sprints. When you put your project manager hat on, does this please you?

Matthew Stublefield:
Yeah, this is similar to the epic forecast that's in Jira Software on-prem. So it measures velocity and then, looks at the stories in the epic and says it's going to take this long. It's not a bad report, but it is when you have to be aware of. Because the point of an epic is we don't yet know all of the work that's involved in this. We may be adding more stories to it. We might have estimated them to be one thing. And we'll discover along the way that maybe there's more work that we uncover. It's going to take longer. So the risk here is people looking at this roadmap and going, "This epic will be done at this time." When in reality, we don't know when it will actually be done. So it's the type of thing as a project manager if I saw this pop in my roadmap and it's a report that's shared with people outside my team, I would be a little concerned that it would be interpreted incorrectly.

Ryan Spilken:
Well, Brenda, your thoughts?

Brenda Burrell:
I am going to have to agree with Matthew. It's a very common thing that Matthew has referenced. Which is, we have this work, it'll be done at this time. We don't know. We don't know what might need to be added. And I see this again, and again, and again, and again, where we see that end date and go, that's it. We can't do anything else. We're not going to be able to accommodate anything else. No, that's not how we're operating here. It would need to be taken with a grain of salt.

Ryan Spilken:
All right. All right. Maybe a teaspoon of sugar.

Brenda Burrell:
No. No. Just salt. We're salty around here.

Ryan Spilken:
Fair. That is absolutely fair. Also in Jira Software, project pages. You are now able to connect a specific Confluence page to a Jira project instead of a specific space. In Jira Work Management, you're able to use the modern Global Issue Create dialog. The notes on this were a little vague. On-boarding already handled by the modern Global Issue Create dialog. Yeah, the Global Issue Create dialog working in Jira Work Management now. If you have noticed the Global Issue Create a dialog in your Jira Work Management instance, let us know.

Matthew Stublefield:
This is the type of update that makes me wonder if I'm taking crazy pills. Could we not Create Issues before into your Work Management? So here's how I read it. And dear listeners, please hit us up one way or the other @adaptavist on social media. Here's how I read this, is they had maybe a custom Issue Create approach in Jira Work Management, and they're rolling back to the global standard defaults one. I don't know, but I struggle with this one too. And I don't even know how to test it, because I'm like, "Was I using a archaic method before? Now, I get to use a modern method?" I don't-

Ryan Spilken:
Isn't it all modern?

Brenda Burrell:
We changed how this works in the backend. No real impact to the users, but we want to say we changed something to show we did work.

Ryan Spilken:
Maybe. Maybe-

Matthew Stublefield:
Maybe.

Ryan Spilken:
It makes me feel bad as a podcast host, but it's like, "I don't know what this means."

Brenda Burrell:
Dear Atlassian, please be more detailed in your update notes.

Matthew Stublefield:
We could get some more GIFs, please. That would really-

Brenda Burrell:
More GIFs.

Matthew Stublefield:
... go a long way.

Brenda Burrell:
More GIFs.

Ryan Spilken:
Please more GIFs. For Confluence Cloud you can now easily add comments when viewing a page. I thought that commenting was always easy, but they've added an additional method to comment on a page. Where if you hover over the right side of the page, you'll reveal an option to add a comment to a section of text. Cool. All of your previous commenting tools are also still available. So highlighting comments, and page comments both still exist, this is just another way to add a page comment. And finally on BitBucket Cloud, default values for custom pipeline variables have added a new property to the pipeline configuration. Now, you can provide a default variable value for a custom pipeline.

Matthew Stublefield:
Everyone rejoiced. Being able to specify default values is really nice, especially when you're sharing this with other teams. So I think that's a cool addition. Turning to on-prem. We've got Confluence 7.14. Frequent listeners will recall that the last release, last podcast, 7.13 was the Long Term Support release. Now, we have 7.14 Data Center release. It is all at the DC, which is another thing we were talking about before the podcast, but not terribly surprising. Service on setting. So wouldn't have much there. The first one on the docket is pretty exciting. Upgrade to the next Confluence version without downtime. For those admins who have been in the game for a while, zero... What was their original term for it? It wasn't zero downtime upgrades, I don't think. Maybe that was what it was called.

Brenda Burrell:
I think that's what it was called.

Matthew Stublefield:
ZDUs. So the ZDU thing, zero downtime upgrades was announced at summit years ago. I don't remember which year, 2015 maybe.

Ryan Spilken:
No.

Matthew Stublefield:
And it was pretty exciting. You think it's 2016?

Ryan Spilken:
I thought it was more recently than that, but go on.

Matthew Stublefield:
Maybe. So it was announced a long time ago, but it didn't actually work immediately. It was almost a year before it really did stuff. And then it was in a very limited scope. So it was, you could only do point releases on a particular architecture when the stars aligned and the moon hit your eye in just the right way.

Brenda Burrell:
On a Tuesday.

Matthew Stublefield:
But it's been progressing over time. And these days you could do this with a rolling upgrade for bug fix releases. So you could do a bug fix release without any downtime. Now, you can upgrade to the next compatible feature release without downtime. So, this is pretty big in your Data Center Cluster. Going to save a lot of time and effort. It's one of those things where it's been a long time now since I was an admin, but oh my God, this is the type of thing that makes me so happy.

Matthew Stublefield:
Like, getting your weekends back and just being able to do it, and potentially to roll back if you need to. So 7.14 very exciting there. You can also now install Confluence Data Center on Kubernetes. Actually you could do that before, but they've made it a bit easier, and some different managed environments, such as Amazon EKS, Azure's Community Service, Google Kubernetes Engine, et cetera. So we'll link to these release notes. If that's something you're interested in, they've got additional article they link to running data center products on a Kubernetes Cluster. Maybe of interest to you. Some data pipeline improvements. So scheduling regular exports, changing export locations. These are things you could do now. Also, some improvements to calendar. Again, just a Confluence Data Center feature, which is, this is the one where you go like, "This could have been server, but whatever." You can now import an iCalendar file into an existing Team Calendar. So if some crazy person in an enterprise is using iCal, get that in your Team Calendar.

Ryan Spilken:
Matthew, can I point out in that, with the Kubernetes bit, is that, the first line infers something that maybe is unintentional there. It says that Jira Confluence and BitBucket Data Center can now be deployed on Kubernetes Clusters. So the buried lead there is that, I don't remember that being a highlighted in the recent Jira update. So have they restructured the deployments for all of them?

Matthew Stublefield:
Maybe. I've known people running the Atlassian tools in Kubernetes for well over a year. So I think the story here is more that these managed environments, like the Amazon or Azure. I'll be honest listeners, sorry, again, failing as a podcast host. I haven't logged into the Amazon account and dug into this. My guess is, there's now a one-click button where they've partnered of the like, I'm going to deploy Jira to Kubernetes' dropdown. Because it's not like you couldn't do this before, but through a bunch of manual effort. I think they've just made it simpler. Yeah. This is the Confluence release notes. Jira Confluence BitBucket Data Center you can deploy these things this way. I don't think they bury the lead, I think the statement of can now be deployed on is a little misleading. I think it obviously could have been deployed before. I think they've just made it easier in these managed environments.

Brenda Burrell:
Yeah. They now offer Helm charts on GitHub and there's a link to the project on GitHub that makes this easy to install Jira Confluence and BitBucket Data Center on Kubernetes. Adds functionality into the products basically.

Matthew Stublefield:
Yeah. I interpret it as, this is making it where I could install it in Kubernetes. Which I would not have been able to do before, but smarter people than me could do it before.

Ryan Spilken:
Do you deploy to Kubernetes? Connect with us on social media @adaptavist.

Matthew Stublefield:
Last, an update for both Data Center and Server, Confluence security improvements. Yeah. And these are actually going to be back ported whatever these improvements are. This is their generic. They've had this in the release notes for the last six months now. This is an ongoing effort. One of the ways we work to continuously improve Confluence, we do this. Notably the upgrades in 7.14 for security will be back ported to Confluence 7.4 Long Term Support and 7.13 Long Term Support. So if you're on either of those, there's a... I don't know if it's going to be place a hot fix or bug fix release, but the security improvements will continue to be available to you in those LTS releases.

Brenda Burrell:
Moving over to BitBucket on-prem. 7.17, a Long Term Support release for BitBucket announced on October 5th. As we know with a Long Term Support release, Atlassian will continue to backport critical security and product bug fixes to 7.17 throughout it's standard two year support window. It has been nearly a year since BitBucket Server and Data Center. The previous Long Term Support release was 7.6. It's been almost a year. There's been a lot that has been added in this new release. Jira integration on the BitBucket dashboard. You can see open Jira's assigned to you, making it easy to see what's coming up without bouncing back and forth between tools. You can require Jira issues in the commit messages with the built-in commit checker for Jira issues. Integrate with Jira Software Cloud using OAuth to enable BitBucket Data Center to send enhanced development information to your Jira site.

Brenda Burrell:
The Required builds merge check gives admins more flexibility and control over pull requests being merged into various destination branches. Some updates for performance and scaling, allowing you to manage all your repos in BitBucket Data Center from one location and automatically decline inactive pull requests. There's an enhanced developer experience allowing reviewer groups for pull requests, drafting multiple comments on files and code during a review process, and collaborating with your team by sharing ideas that combine code, data, and visualizations by rendering Jupyter notebooks. Upgrading is going to be a lot easier. Zero downtime upgrade by performing a rolling upgrade and integrated CI and CD updates where you can set up actions and rerun builds from BitBucket on the Builds page and Pull request page Builds tab. So some of these things we have talked about already. It's all been packaged up into a single release.

Brenda Burrell:
So about 140 issues resolved. There is a lengthy Long Term Support release change log for 7.17. Also, available as mentioned previously, BitBucket Data Center can be installed in Kubernetes. If that's a thing that is of interest to you, this is outlined on the release notes that we'll link in the show notes. As always, there is an upgrade guide and matrix that you can take a look at before you do your upgrade. Yeah, a big beefy update for BitBucket on-prem. In additional, BitBucket news, action required for GitKraken users using SSH. So this is where we're restraining the GitKraken. Atlassian recently learned that users of BitBucket Cloud who generated SSH keys using GitKraken versions 7.7.0 to 8.0.0, could be subject to a vulnerability resulting in the creation of duplicate keys. So the developers of the get GitKraken app have reached out to Atlassian when they discovered that there were duplicate keys getting generated and have fixed the bug in version 8.0.1 of their software.

Brenda Burrell:
This was not the result of a compromised data breach or other data exposure events of BitBucket Cloud. Now, there is a link to more information about the fix in the blog post, which we will link to in the show notes. In order to protect Atlassians customers, the BitBucket Cloud team launched an investigation to identify weak keys, as well as any signs of unauthorized access to repos. There is no evidence that any customer data has been compromised. BitBucket Cloud team has gone ahead and revoked keys that were identified as weak, as well as adding them to a block list preventing future use. If you were using one of these keys, you should've received an email notification with instructions to generate a new key. At this point, it's highly recommended that users of GitKraken update to the latest version. Again, 8.0.1 has the bug fix and go ahead and generate new keys.

Matthew Stublefield:
So a few weeks ago we talked about or asked few podcasts ago, two weeks in between, a few months ago. Some in the before time.

Ryan Spilken:
Who even noticed?

Matthew Stublefield:
We talked about Atlassian Codegeist, which is this competition Atlassian runs every year, for people to build apps and compete for prizes, and fame along with the fortune. This year was a building with Forge-

Brenda Burrell:
You okay there, Ryan?

Ryan Spilken:
You can't see the air quotes around fame. That's all [crosstalk 00:21:29], fame.

Matthew Stublefield:
I made no quotes. And no gestures for me, that's for sure. So this years Codegeist focused on Forge. So you had to build a cloud app using Forge. And there were a ton of submissions. A lot of diversity interesting things. I am not going to go through all of them. I'm not even going to go through many or any of them, but we will link to the Codegeist 2021 winners if you want to take a look to them. I will highlight the grand prizes. So there were three categories that Atlassian wanted to focus on.

Matthew Stublefield:
So the business category, there's one called Office Manager. That's for a shared workspaces so you can reserve your desk at the shared workspace. If the shared workspace everybody's using the same Jira instance, I guess. In the coworking space and you want to reserve a desk, that's the thing you can do. One called, Diligence Doer designed for data teams to prevent breaking changes, checking some things out. And then Jira Hook Ninja, position yourself as an integration platform as a service for web hooks supported applications. So all pretty cool. There's videos for all of them you can go out and take a look. And then there's like another 34 jobs, like second place, third place, fourth place, honorable mentions, wild cards, bonus prizes. All kinds of stuff out here. It's pretty cool.

Matthew Stublefield:
So take a look. I just spot checked a few of them. The ones that I look at are not available in the marketplace. So if you got it, you see one that you're really excited about, restrain yourself, mostly the GitKraken. It's not there yet. You can't get it. There's no guarantee that these people will list them on the marketplace. But my guess is they put in the effort they won, they probably will. You'll find out there. So if you see something you really like, you can always reach out to the DEVS and ask when they're going to do it, or just keep searching. Search in the marketplace and just hit a five or refresh over and over and over again for the rest of your life until it shows up. Whichever approach works best for you.

Ryan Spilken:
And finally, what are you doing on the 28th of October? Well, if you're me, you're going to be hosting a webinar on migrating ScriptRunner from Server Data Center to the cloud. So if you are one of the Adaptavist ScriptRunner users or administrators, and you're looking to move to a different platform, this webinar is for you. Going to be an opportunity for you to discuss questions and situations with Bobby Bailey, a fantastic engineer, and Phill Fox, our Principal Customer Success Advocate. We'll also have Mo Backer on the call, a Product Marketing Manager who knows his ScriptRunner fairly well, I must say. So we're going to be online talking about moving your ScriptRunner experience over to the cloud from on-premise on the 28th of October, and there'll be a link to sign up for that webinar included in the show notes.

Matthew Stublefield:
And that's it for this week's Atlassian Ecosystem Podcast. Hit us up on social @adaptavist. Wherever find socials can be found and, or made. Let us know if there's a story you'd like to talk more about, or essentially, maybe something that you want us to talk less about. For agile, we welcome the feedback. And be sure to tune in next time. Make sure we're subscribed in your pod being app of awesomeness. And maybe you don't really need to share or subscribe, but just maybe get a little review and just a little tap. We'll tap a star there. Little nudge there. And for Brenda Burrell, Ryan Spilken, this is Matthew Stublefield signing off. Thanks again for listening to the Atlassian Ecosystem Podcasts on Adaptavist Live, the Adaptavist podcast network.