Atlassian’s Bitbucket gets Smart Mirroring to clone code repos faster

Publicly traded enterprise software vendor Atlassian today announced updates to its Bitbucket software for collaborating on source code. The most interesting addition is a feature called Smart Mirroring — it makes sure that code repositories can be cloned to individual developer’s computers faster by keeping the repos in companies’ on-premises data centers in different locations synchronized.

The idea is to prevent developers from waiting a very long time before they can even start working on code. And it looks like Smart Mirroring can, in fact, make a difference in that department.

“In one of our own internal tests, we have seen clone times get 25X faster for 5GB repositories between San Francisco and Sydney,” Atlassian senior product manager Roger Barnes wrote in a blog post.

But this feature won’t be available to all companies that use Bitbucket. At this point, at least, it’s only available to customers of BitBucket’s pricey enterprise tier. It’s a read-only feature that supports Git’s clone, fetch, and pull commands. Atlassian first talked about Smart Mirroring at the Atlassian Summit in San Francisco in November.

In addition to Smart Mirroring, Atlassian is announcing support for the Projects feature — for organizing many repos — in the Bitbucket Cloud service (previously available in Bitbucket Server and Data Center) and Git Large File Storage (LFS) for Bitbucket Server and Data Center.

Products that compete with Atlassian’s Bitbucket include GitHub and the up-and-coming GitLab. Atlassian acquired Bitbucket.org in 2010.

Atlassian went public last month.