You can run any of your builds on elastic agents, providing that the capabilities of the elastic agent meets the requirements of the build. An elastic agent inherits the capabilities of the image it was created from. Hence, you can see which build plans can be run by elastic agents, by checking which plan's requirements match your elastic image's capabilities.

You view your elastic image and the builds that it meets the requirements of, on the Agents and Plans matrix.

An elastic agent operates in a similar fashion to a non-elastic agent. That is, Bamboo will determine if there is a build in the build queue that can be built by the elastic agent, and assigns the build to that agent if the build requirements are met.

If you do not have any free elastic agents running, you will need to start one to make it available to builds. An elastic agent is automatically started when you start an elastic instance. Read Starting an Elastic Instance for instructions on how to start an elastic instance.

We strongly recommend that you shut down your elastic instance (and hence your elastic agent), when it is not in use. Minimising redundant instance uptime will help optimise your Elastic Bamboo running costs. Read Shutting Down an Elastic Instance for instructions on how to shut down an elastic instance.

Bamboo does not automatically start or stop elastic agents based on demand from the build queue. If there is a build in the build queue that can be built using an elastic agent, Bamboo will not automatically start up one. Bamboo also will not automatically stop an elastic agent when a build is completed.

However, Elastic Bamboo can be controlled via the Bamboo Remote API. For example, you could implement cron jobs to intelligently start and stop elastic instances, so that elastic agents are available at key times for your builds.

The name of the image and elastic agent that ran a build can be viewed as part of the build result. Please see the Viewing a Build Result page for more information.

You may want to customise the capabilities of your elastic agents to suit your build strategy. For example, if you want to force certain builds to only run on elastic agents, you can add a custom capability of elastic=true to your elastic agents and add the same requirement to your builds.

To customise the capabilities for your elastic agents, you need to customise the capabilities of the image that they are created from. Read Configuring Elastic Agent Capabilities for instructions.

As Elastic Bamboo usage varies from customer to customer, we cannot provide a definitive cost estimate for running a build using Elastic Bamboo. We do provide high level guidelines for Elastic Bamboo costs, based on our own experience of using Elastic Bamboo at Atlassian, on the Elastic Bamboo Costs page.

You can significantly reduce the costs and time taken to run a build by configuring Elastic Bamboo to use Amazon's Elastic Block Store (EBS).

The Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides persistent storage volumes that can be attached to EC2 instances. Elastic Bamboo can use the EBS to store snapshots of relatively static build information, such as checkouts of source code and Maven repository data. You can choose a snapshot to create EBS volumes from. These volumes can then be attached to your elastic instances when they start up.