DevOps / Bamboo: Continuous Integration & Deployment Interview Questions
What is the difference between shared and job artifacts?
Both start the same way — a job declares which files it produces — but the scope of where those files travel differs.
| Job (unshared) Artifact | Shared Artifact |
| Available only within that job, or downloadable from the build results page. | Automatically copied and made available to jobs in later stages. |
| Good for outputs only humans need to inspect, e.g. a coverage report. | Good for outputs later stages depend on, e.g. a compiled binary needed for packaging or deployment. |
| No extra storage/transfer overhead across stages. | Adds transfer time to later stages, since files are copied to each agent that needs them. |
The practical rule: mark an artifact shared only if a later stage genuinely consumes it, since every shared artifact adds storage and transfer cost to the plan.
A test coverage report only viewed by humans, never consumed by a later stage, should be:
What extra cost does marking an artifact as shared introduce?
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