Standalone Bamboo requirements and installation recommendations
Asked by Brian Ellis:

We are setting up a standalone Bamboo server for access from multiple offices and would like to get more information on the following:  

Which operating system would you recommend installing Bamboo server on?  
RHEL, Centos, Ubuntu, SUSE Linux, WIN 2008 R2, Win 2012  
We will be building for all OS's so other OS will have to be configured as remote Agents.   

Which is the most stable release of the Bamboo server Win or Linux?  

Which version is most likely to release new features first, win or Linux?  

We are considering hosting our bamboo server in EC2. What are the caveats?  

What would be a recommended instance size? m1.large?

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Answers:
author: Humberto Madeira
body: \>Which operating system would you recommend installing Bamboo server on?

Windows Server Standard 2008 R2 is a good choice.

It will require a 30GB (min) boot disk and about 100GB (min) data disk - (Not sure what 2012 requires, but in general, the more recent the Windows, the more boot space it needs)

In reality, as long as you are using Windows Server, it shouldn't matter that much to Bamboo.

I do recommend that you run it in a VM so that you can snapshot it and take VM backups etc.

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\>Which is the most stable release of the Bamboo server Win or Linux?

In general, Java and Tomcat work better in Windows than under Linux. Linux, specially the Debian variants (including Ubuntu), have poor support and overly rigid configurations for running Java as a service. The Linux distributions have made good strides lately due to the efforts of the Linux Standard Base, but running on Windows is still more comfy than on Linux.

I wouldn't jump on the Linux bandwagon without a reasonable in-house Linux geek presence, but with it, it should be doable. If you do choose Linux, the boot disk can be as small as 10GB.

\>Which version is most likely to release new features first, win or Linux?

Bamboo is a Java application - there is no difference between Windows and Linux versions other than a bit of wrapping that you could implement yourself (we do).

\>We are considering hosting our bamboo server in EC2. What are the caveats?

If you run Bamboo on EC2, you will have to expose your bamboo instance to the Internet. If it is meant to be secure, you will need to set up either SSL on Tomcat or set up an SSL reverse proxy on the same host instance (preferably Apache Server 2.4.x - using AJP1.3)

You will also have a bit of an issue with configuring external (usually LDAP) authentication - your authentication service will need to be able to run securely over the internet.

I also have no idea how you would go about securing your Bamboo remote agents to your build servers. Possibly it could be done with support from Atlassian - not sure about it.

Publishing would also have to be addressed - if you hold build artifacts to avoid publishing over the internet, you will probably have to up your data drive size to a terabyte or so.

If you run Bamboo in-house, you can avoid exposing Bamboo to the internet if you want. (your remote offices would have to VPN in however)

Or you can expose it to the internet (so your remote offices don't have to use VPN), but the authentication service doesn't have to pass through the internet, and more importantly, your Bamboo remote agents, and all of the build servers they represent don't have to be secured against the internet.

\>What would be a recommended instance size? m1.large?

Depends on your workload, but m1.large is roughly comparable to what we are running in house, plus publishing space, (we run multiple offices) so I would think that would be a reasonable size.


author: Przemek Bruski
body: > Which operating system would you recommend installing Bamboo server on?  
> RHEL, Centos, Ubuntu, SUSE Linux, WIN 2008 R2, Win 2012

You should always choose the OS you're most familiar with. All things being equal, I'd recommend Linux over Windows. Choose the distribution you're most familiar with. DB choice is more important - generally, Postgres is easiest to use and offers the best performance.
>
> We will be building for all OS's so other OS will have to be configured as remote Agents.   
>
> Which is the most stable release of the Bamboo server Win or Linux?

Bamboo will be as stable on Linux as it is on Windows. When using Git, out of the box the performance will be better with Linux.
>
> Which version is most likely to release new features first, win or Linux?

For the server, the same. If you're talking about EC2 agent images. Windows tends to slightly lag behind with features comparing to Linux EC2 agents.
>
> We are considering hosting our bamboo server in EC2. What are the caveats?

We've had reports of performance issues with Git on EC2-hosted Bamboo Server. We're generally very EC2 friendly, so if you encounter issues with EC2-based Bamboo, we'll try to help you.
>
> <br />
>
> What would be a recommended instance size? m1.large?

c1.medium should be enough. Go m1.large if you have a bigger instance.


author: Harry Chan
body: Atlassian uses Linux internally. Atlassian uses Postgresql internally. Does that give you more confidence? I wouldn't run Bamboo with Windows Server unless you need local agent with .NET. Java runs fine in Linux and better. You don't need Java as a service. You want the web server (read: Tomcat) as a service and that's very easy.

Linux saves on resources, requires less GUI work (which can be good for remote instance). If you don't have local agents, you won't need a large EC2 instance. It's all relative.

We run Bamboo (just the controller) on less than 1GB of RAM and some shares of CPU fine. It runs on Ubuntu in a virtual environment.

Linux has been very stable.

Have also dealt with Windows instances, mainly for .NET related deployments and other reasons. It simply takes a lot longer to setup and manage - Windows Server has a lot more features and complexity out of the box that isn't required.


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