Atlassian’s acquisition of Bitbucket (shouldn’t that be “bitBucket? How un-fashionable!), a hosted version control service, seems to be another step in the strategic direction shown by their launch of the Jira Studio service, which included hosted issue tracking, wiki, source code search, review, and continuous integration with Bamboo. Jira Studio already had Subversion hosting, but bitBucket offers Distributed version control, which is rapidly moving towards the mainstream.

What this looks like to me is Atlassian moving from providing tools for development teams (as opposed to tools for individual developers, such as IDEs) as essentially shrink-wrapped products, to providing them as a hosted service. Development Infrastructure as a Service (DIAAS) if you will, or better yet (more trendy!), devops as a Service (DevOpsaaS? DOaaS?)

This seems like a good position to get into as development for the cloud grows as a platform. Regardless of whether proper PaaS ever takes off (I’m sure it will, but it may take longer than we think), even teams developing for current application server platforms hosted on IaaS clouds can benefit from DevOpsaaS.