Atlassian Launches Private Beta Testing for its Forge Project
In December 2019, Atlassian launched the beta version of Forge Project, a unique serverless platform that comes with security built-in. This initiative aims to solve many problems with managing cloud infrastructure, designing user experience across different platforms, and building DevOps pipelines. As a result, development teams are able to build their own SaaS products without deep expertise in cloud architectures. With hosted infrastructure, Forge UI, and tools to turbocharge your DevOps, Forge is setting a new standard in app development for the cloud.
Key capabilities of Forge
Forge allows building trusted, scalable, and cross-platform cloud apps with the minimum amount of code and abstracts away some of the complexities of cloud-native development. The platform is comprised of three core components:
- hosted infrastructure
For computing and storage, the platform offers serverless FaaS (Function-as-a-Service) model based on AWS Lambda. In essence, Forge wraps the application code and deploys it to Lambda. The major advantage here is that development teams will be able to write functions instead of entire web services and automate infrastructure orchestration. It’s also worth mentioning that as serverless architecture, Forge eliminates the need for an always-running server, replacing it with a FaaS function that responds to HTTP requests via an API gateway.
- Forge UI
Forge engineers have built the platform’s flexible, declarative UI language to help their users define and test user experiences for all platforms at once. Forge also runs the updated versions of helper libraries, such as Atlaskit, that provide out-of-the-box UI components.
- DevOps toolchain
Intuitive and easy-to-use, the Command Line Interface (CLI) tool powers the built-in DevOps toolchain and troubleshooting features of the platform. Atlassian also added a few extras, such as CI/CD tools powered by Bitbucket Pipelines and a built-in set of templates, to make developers’ experience even better.
Extra advantages it brings
The FaaS model based on AWS Lambda is instantly scalable and event-driven, enabling developers to build a system of alerts and notifications. Also, this system is tenant-aware and supports isolated data storage. That means that the function invocation can be tied to a specific customer site, and data leakage across tenants is prevented. This enables automatic assurances for the privacy and security of end-users.
Today, many companies are dealing with masses of user-generated content, personal data, and personally identifiable information. Managing these special types of information requires additional layers of security, as well as specific measures in order to comply with regulations such as GDPR. Forge promises to shoulder the burden of app development and provide built-in GDPR compliance and data residency controls.
Forge is designed to supplement the Atlassian tools and frameworks at the same time as supporting existing integration patterns in Atlassian Connect. With the release of the beta version, it is expected that working with REST APIs and other operations within the ecosystem will be simplified. Finally, developers will be able to stay within the Atlassian cloud from the beginning to end without needing to implement routing between the connector and other frameworks of their choice.
Currently the hosted app platform is available in a closed beta, and we are proud to inform you that Triangu has received an invitation to test out Forge. We are keen to experience the stand-out features of Forge Beta and will keep you up-to-date with our feedback and product updates. Stay tuned!
