Remote agents ¶

Remote agents can be provisioned to a Kubernetes cluster to run jobs delegated to them via a Bamboo server. An agent can run a job if its capabilities match the requirements of a job. Each job inherits the requirements from individual tasks that it contains.

You can learn more details about remote agents on the official documentation page.

Requirements ¶

Bamboo server prerequisites

The Bamboo server instance must use a valid Bamboo Data Center instance license and be fully configured
The Bamboo server instance must have security token verification enabled
The Bamboo server instance must have remote agent authentication disabled

Deployment ¶

Steps required for deploying a remote agent

Configure Bamboo server for remote agent support
Deploy agent

1. Configure Bamboo server ¶

There are 2 approaches for doing this:

Automatically when deploying Bamboo server
Manually via Bamboo server agent settings

Automatically ¶

When initially deploying Bamboo server its values.yaml can be configured to:

disable remote agent authentication
define a custom security token

This will allow remote agents that are configured with the same security token to automatically join the cluster.

First, create a secret to store a custom security token with which remote agent(s) should authenticate to the Bamboo server.

Security token format

The security token should be set to a 40-character hexadecimal string. The following command can be used to generate a string in this format:

xxd -l 20 -p /dev/urandom

Add the generated string (security token) to a K8s secret

kubectl create secret generic security-token --from-literal=security-token=<security token>

Update the Bamboo values.yaml with this secret and disable agent authentication:

bamboo:
  securityToken:
    secretName: "security-token"
    secretKey: security-token
  disableAgentAuth: true

Disabling remote agent authentication

when setting the property disableAgentAuth to true this will have the effect of automatically allowing agents with the correct security token to communicate with the Bamboo server. This property is useful for testing, and when deployments requiring many agents are needed. This property can also be left in its default state of false in which case each agent will need to be approved manually via the Agents settings tab of the Bamboo server instance. Additional details on agent authentication can be found here

Manually ¶

When logged into the Bamboo server instance, and from the Agents settings tab, enable security token verification, and disable remote agent authentication
Navigate to the remote agent's installation page by selecting the Install remote agent button from the Agents settings tab
Create a K8s secret using the security token rendered on the Installing a remote agent page

create secret using token...

kubectl create secret generic security-token --from-literal=security-token=<security token>

2. Deploy agent ¶

Update the bamboo agent values.yaml to utilize the security token secret and point to the bamboo server instance

replicaCount: 3
agent:
  securityToken:
    secretName: "security-token"
    secretKey: security-token
  server: "bamboo.bamboo.svc.cluster.local"

Values

As long as your cluster has the physical resources the replicaCount can be set to any value from 1 .. 1 + n
agent.server should be configured with the K8s DNS record for the Bamboo server service. The value should be of the form: <service_name>.<namespace>.svc.cluster.local

Install the agent

helm install bamboo-agent atlassian-data-center/bamboo-agent -f values.yaml

Custom agents

By default the Bamboo agent Helm chart will deploy the [bamboo-agent-base](https://hub.docker.com/r/atlassian/bamboo-agent-base){.external} Docker image. This image provides the following capabilities out of the box:

* JDK 11
* Git & Git LFS
* Maven 3
* Python 3

For details on defining and deploying agents with custom/additional capabilities view the [agent capabilities guide](AGENT_CAPABILITIES.md)

Scaling the agent count ¶

The number of active agents can be easily increased or decreased:

helm upgrade --set replicaCount=<desired number of agents> \
             --reuse-values \
             <name of the release>
             atlassian-data-center/bamboo-agent

Troubleshooting ¶

You can find the most common errors relating to agent configuration in the official Bamboo agent documentation.