BAMBOO JIRA BITBUCKET - USER management and authentication planning

[timothy schmidt]

With no hard details yet, the plan is to utilize the three applications JIRA BITBUCKET and BAMBOO on Windows. My limited understanding at this time is that interaction between the applications is facilitated by the use of application links.

However what's not clear is the potential ramifications of using only LOCAL user accounts in JIRA and BAMBOO (potentially disjoint user sets) , as opposed to incorporating  a centralize LDAP USER control and authentication framework.

Does anyone have any links to docs that discuss this issue in more depth, or anecdotal stories and/or suggestions on this topic?

Thank you,

T.S.

[Mikael Sandberg · Accepted solution]

From a user standpoint you may want to use an external user directory, that way users do not have to maintain a separate password for Jira, Bitbucket and Bamboo, instead you would use your Windows credentials to log on. That way you as the Atlassian admin do not have to manage it. 

Our setup is using Jira as the main user directory (may migrate over to Crowd in the near future for centralized user management), and we have Bitbucket and Confluence linked to it. New users are added to the correct groups in Jira and are then synced to Bitbucket and Confluence.

[timothy schmidt]

Thank you for you quick response Mikael!

Is the list of users and groups that bamboo can authenticate (but which is actually managed in JIRA)  synced to BAMBOO at regular intervals so there is no LIVE dependency from BAMBOO on JIRA 's being online in order to let existing users login or access BAMBOO via REST calls ? 

If not, what if JIRA goes down or is otherwise incapacitated. Can a BAMBOO local admin log into BAMBOO or is this prevented in this configuration. If so, then can BAMBOO be manually reconfigured (config files) and it's service restarted to allow  for a LOCAL BAMBOO admin user, etc. to log in,  in this type of scenario?

Can authentication be two tiered? I.E.  defined either as LDAP  or LOCAL(for local bamboo accounts defined within JIRA)?

Thank you,

T.S.

[Mikael Sandberg]

If you use Jira as your main user directory you are dependent on it being up in order to log on to Bamboo. In our case we have local admin accounts in all tools in the internal directory, so in the case of Jira going down we can always log on as local admin if needed. This is also the reason we may switch over to Crowd in the near feature. So far we have not had any issues using Jira as the main user directory, we have had outages but they have been limited to less then 10 minutes at the time.