Introduction to Bitbucket for beginner

 Bitbucket is a web-based hosting service and version control repositories for projects and owned by Atlassian. It was launched in 2008, in Australia, and was originally an independent startup offering hosting only for Mercurial projects. 

Version Control Systems are tools that helps in manage the code for a project as it changes over time and allow past versions of the project to be saved. Bitbucket is a competitor to GitHub.

Bitbucket offers both commercial plans and free accounts. It is free for individuals and small teams (up to 5 users) with unlimited public and private repositories. It provide a central place to manage git repositories and collaborate on source code and guide the user through the development flow.

Who uses?
Bitbucket is used by reportedly 2549 companies in their tech stacks, including Salesforce, PayPal, and CircleCI etc.

Feature:  It provides awesome features that include
1. Acces control to restrict access to the source code.
2. Workflow control to impose a project or team workflow.
3. Pull requests with in-line commenting for collaboration on code review.
4. Jira integration for full development traceability.
5. Full Rest API to build features custom to your workflow if they are not already available from our Marketplace

The three deployment option for Bitbucket offers different features are:

1. Bitbucket Cloud
It is hosted on Atlassian's servers and accessed via a URL. It has an exclusive built-in continuous integration tool, Pipelines, that enables you to build, test and deploy from directly within Bitbucket. You can learn more about Pipelines features and capabilities here. However, there are some restricted functions in Atlassian Cloud apps.

2. Bitbucket Server
It is hosted on-premise, in your environment. It does not come with a built-in testing and deployment tool, but it has strong 
integrations with Bamboo, our powerful continuous integration and continuous delivery tool that allows you to completely automate your build 
processes. There are also more apps available than for Cloud, and the license is perpetual.

3. Bitbucket Data Center
It looks like a single instance of Bitbucket Server to users, but it is hosted on a number of servers in a cluster on your environment.

Conclusion
Bitbucket and GitHub are approx similar in terms of features and either will be sufficient code repository hosting services if you need to use Git and or need a simple personal account. Both have free unlimited private repositories. And if your version control system is Mercurial, then only Bitbucket is good. Unfortunately, Bitbucket does not supports SVN. Bitbucket and GitHub each has some useful features not found in the other, like as GitHub pages for small web-hosting projects, or Bitbucket’s JIRA integration.