Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In 2020, cloud migration sped up by a factor of 24, according to McKinsey. Would you be surprised to learn there were a lot of factors driving that shift? Due to COVID-19, companies needed to go remote fast and securely. They wanted to lift the maintenance burden off overworked IT teams. And, in the face of the year’s worldwide economic uncertainty, motivation to take advantage of cloud’s cost savings was running high.

Allowing steps to skip downloading artifacts has been a highly requested feature from our customers. You can now disable artifact downloading on certain steps that do not require any artifacts, which will allow faster builds and can reduce your costs as a result. Disabling artifact downloads during a step is as easy as switching off a flag. Note that these steps can still produce artifacts to pass down to future steps.

Bitbucket Pipelines now allows you to talk to your favorite third-party applications without an access token or secret. You no longer need to store your secrets in Bitbucket Pipelines. You can generate an OpenID Connect token in Bitbucket Pipelines, and use that to talk to any third-party application that supports OpenID Connect.

We’ve launched a new Android template in Bitbucket Pipelines. This template helps you automate building and testing an Android project in a Docker container, using Gradle as your build tool. Access the template code here or go to the Pipelines tab of your repo and select the Android template. This blog walks you through how this template is structured and has tips on how you can scale it.

Get stories about tech and teams in your inbox Our brains are simply not equipped to handle all the information we’re trying to stuff into them. That’s the (paraphrased) sentiment of Dominican friar Vincent of Beauvais, a 13th-century monk, who was struggling to manage “the multitude of books, the shortness of time and the slipperiness of memory.” It seems the printing press was burying old Beauvais in a never-ending pile of text. What’s a monk to do?

At Atlassian, we believe that the future will be led by innovation and technology. Particularly now, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we can see just how integral the tech industry has become, interwoven into every facet of our lives. As technology becomes indispensable, it is inevitable and appropriate that governments take steps to mitigate the risk factors from this deep integration of digital technologies into our day-to-day lives. Get stories like this in your inbox.

Bitbucket Cloud’s pull request sidebar is useful because it displays all the relevant details of the pull request you’re looking at. However, with so much information present, it can be hard to find the information you need. To address feedback we’ve received about its readability and usability, we’ve given it a redesign.

Bitbucket Pipelines now allows steps with a manual trigger to be used in parallel groups, satisfying one of the highest voted feature requests. This feature provides more flexibility in Pipelines, allowing teams to configure pipelines with multiple options and then only run the steps they actually need to run, at the time they want. For example you can choose which environments should be deployed for individual developers, giving them different environments to test and do their work.

One of the most critical activities for a developer is reviewing code. Code review helps developers fix bugs before shipping, learn about the codebase, and pass along a team’s values to new (and longstanding) developers. To double down on these benefits, we’re releasing a new tool to facilitate communication between pull request reviewers and authors: PR Reviewer Status. Until now, Bitbucket has only had one reviewer status: Approved.

Fake news spreads six times faster than factual news. The algorithms built into social media software, in an effort to hold our attention, feed us information that triggers the basest instincts of our complex psychologies. These are some of the starkest realities exposed in the Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma.” Holding our attention is what the robot (if you will) was programmed to do. And it’s doing its job really, really well.