Published September 19, 2023 in Bitbucket

Five exciting new features coming to Bitbucket Cloud

Published in Bitbucket
Ash Moosa
Ash Moosa

As part of our product strategy to build for scale, security, and compliance, Bitbucket Cloud is continuing to invest in features that help enterprise teams operate at scale and build world-class software. In this blog, we’ll share some of our recently shipped features and five exciting features we have lined up for you.

If you’re a Bitbucket Server customer looking to migrate before the end of support (Feb 15, 2024), we have some migration resources listed at the bottom of the blog. With Bitbucket Cloud, you get a trusted, secure platform, deep integrations to Atlassian tools, and market-leading DevOps apps to help you connect your workflow from planning to operations.

Recently shipped:

  • Scale CI/CD workflows: Import Bitbucket Pipelines yml files across repos so all developers on a team can use the same consistent workflow, performing all the same workflow steps and tests across the project. Learn more
  • Find unresolved comments faster: When you have multiple files to review and many comments, it can be hard to find the comments that still need attention. We’ve added a new dropdown in the pull request page that lets you jump to unresolved comments or find specific resolved ones. Learn more
  • Support Linux ARM self-hosted runners: If you have builds that require ARM runners, you can now point your cloud builds using Bitbucket Pipelines to your runners behind the firewall. Learn more
  • Project-level merge checks: If you have a complex project with many repos, you can now apply a standard set of checks to all repositories within a project, making it easier to manage and maintain a consistent workflow. Learn more

What we’re building now

Here are 5 exciting features that we’re launching in the next few months.

Customize Bitbucket Cloud with Forge

Forge is Atlassian’s serverless app development platform, designed to enable customers and marketplace vendors to build secure, reliable, and scalable apps for our cloud tools. It’s hosted on the Atlassian platform, with intuitive UI, and has API authentication built-in. Currently, Forge has been available to build apps for Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management users and it’s now coming to Bitbucket Cloud. With Forge being integrated into Bitbucket, you can build custom apps and integrate them into your Bitbucket Cloud instance. Review Forge docs.

Custom merge checks

We are building functionality to enable you to add custom merge checks into your instance using Forge.

While our current merge checks feature allows you to select from a predefined list of code quality checks before merging code, we know that each organization has its own set of processes and compliance requirements that need to be followed when merging code. With custom merge checks, you’ll be able to define custom criteria that must pass in order for a pull request to be merged to production.

You’ll be able to build your custom rules in Forge and integrate it into your instance. For example, custom rules could be something like:

  • no merges after 5pm on a Friday or when there are no on-call engineers scheduled
  • PR’s must include approvals from specific members of the team, based on the files modified
  • Check if all feature flags in the code have been created in your feature flag tool e.g. Launch Darkly.

These custom checks will appear in your merge checks UI in Bitbucket Cloud and users can toggle on/off or configure as needed based on the project.

Generative AI in the comment and PR description editor

In April, we announced Atlassian Intelligence to bring the power of AI into our tools. We are currently doing an EAP of having AI in the comment editor and PR description editor. You’ll be able to use AI to summarize your comments or change the tone of comments before you publish. We are currently in EAP and plan to roll out soon.

Code review with AI

Next, we are working to launch AI functionality to help speed up code reviews. When you submit code for review, AI will analyze the code and leave comments with suggested changes. You can review and decide whether to accept the change or not. This means reviewers can spend more time on code where manual review is needed. Follow our roadmap to stay updated on the launch timeline. This is currently in design.

Unified User Management

We’ve heard from many customers that you want to manage Bitbucket users the same way you do with Jira and Confluence. With Unified User Management, we’re bringing Bitbucket user, group, and permission management to Atlassian Admin. This means that you can manage users across your Atlassian tools in one unified place and connect to third-party identity providers like Okta, Azure AD, and others via Atlassian Access. This has been one of the top requests from our enterprise admins. New Bitbucket customers will be eligible in early 2024 and existing customers will get the feature in late 2024. Learn more

Follow our public roadmap to follow along for timing on these projects.

Migration resources

If you’re a Server or Data Center customer considering migrating to Bitbucket Cloud, here are some resources to get started or continue the process via our support resources.

Five exciting new features coming to Bitbucket Cloud