Bamboo licensing restricts number of available remote agents or concurrently running remote agents

[Kevin O'Neill]

I'm considering evaluating Bamboo for my company.. but before I can begin I need to determine if this might be a non-starter:

* Use-case: we're currently using Jenkins... We have several local test instances, with multiple instances per client we support. We have a slave running on each instance... as part of our nightly builds we deploy our Java web app to each client instance.. these deploy jobs are ant targets that need to be run on the machine to which they're being deploy. This restriction means that we have many more agents than the actual number of concurrent jobs we require...

For our purposes a 5-agent bamboo license would be sufficient... but with this license would be able to continue using more than 5 remote agents... i.e. does Bamboo allow us (for example) to have 100 remotes agents with only 5 active at a time.. or does it only allow a maximum of 5 remote agents (whether or not they're running)?

[Vadim Rutkevich]

Kevin,

you can try our updated version of the add-on Virtual Agents for Bamboo. It allows you to automatically start and stop virtual machines with build agents. So you can much more efficiently utilize your license for remote agents. When the agent has no assigned tasks, the add-on stops the virtual machine with it and frees the slot for another agent. So you needn't all the time track your Bamboo tasks, you need just once to create mappings between agents and virtual machines, and the add-on will further start the appropriate virtual machine with agent for your queued tasks.

Thanks.

Best Regards,

Vadim Rutkevich

[Jason Robinson]

does a "Bamboo Agent" = "connected jenkins build node"?

[Przemek Bruski]

As soon as the deployment starts, you need to disable the agent so that it does not get any new jobs (you can automate it using curl). As the last stage of your deployment, you should kill the agent (start that in the background with 30 seconds delay). Then, you only need to make sure that the agents are available when the new round of deployment starts.

It will take some scripting, but yes, it's doable.

[Kevin O'Neill]

How difficult would it be to set this up to occur in an automated manner? (i.e. the starting up / bringing down) of agents ... My assumption is that this is not a use-case that's going to be easy to work with...

[Przemek Bruski]

The restriction is on the number of available remote agents. In your scenario, you'd need to shut them down after deployment.

[Chad Barnes]

Just for my clarification... the restriction is on the number of remote agents identified as "Online" within the Bamboo server remote agents list? There is no restriction on the number of remote agents identified as "Offline"? If that is all true, what happens when an agent attempts to start but there are already MAX_AGENTS in the online state?