Since 2020, when Atlassian announced its focus on becoming a cloud-first company, many users and customers have been concerned about the future of the Data Center deployment option. To minimize these concerns, Atlassian has been taking action, announcing new Data Center version updates to Jira Software, Jira Service Management, Confluence, Bitbucket, and more; learn more about these updates.
After the announcements cloud-focused made during the main Atlassian event, the Team'22, many people have been concerned about the meaning of this decision regarding the future of Atlassian Data Center. The Atlassian products hosted in this option are critical to specific organizations, especially the larger ones. That's why Atlassian is committed to supporting its customers, those who have decided to migrate to the cloud and those who have opted to remain in Data Center.
Atlassian upholds that Data Center remains an essential offering within their portfolio, as it guarantees and meets each company's unique needs and requirements. Investing in this upgrade reinforces the strategy of supplying the most critical needs from the point of view of performance, scalability, security, compliance, infrastructure, and operations.
Atlassian will continue strengthening the Data Center deployment for the future, specifically focused on those features their users need the most, evolving along with them. Each of these aspects is in the Data Center roadmap.
The enhancements Atlassian has promised to deliver will offer additional value and an improved user experience. This focus is based on three key areas:
To meet long-term growth objectives and maintain the trust that Data Center products can support user growth, increased load, and more complex data models, Atlassian is investing efforts to optimize the performance and scaling processes.
Enhancements aim to proactively optimize constraints as identified, either by removing the bottleneck or by providing strategic guidance, documentation, and tools to administrators to remove the constraints, as seen in the roadmap.
As you'll see in the following, Data Center investments will focus on core platform functions, customizable controls, and improved strategic guidance on cleansing and archiving capabilities, monitoring and reporting, and apps and integrations.
Security and compliance requirements are continually evolving, one of the main reasons why many have not migrated to the cloud yet.
A critical part of managing an instance is being aware of these risks, mitigating them, and complying with their requirements. This is why Atlassian is improving security, taking a more robust approach to it to alleviate as many complexities as possible.
Since last year, Atlassian has made more than 2,500 security fixes and is continually evolving in this process based on user demands for compliance and accessibility. Please check the Atlassian Trust Center for further details.
Having your software tools in a self-managed environment doesn't mean you won't get the same benefits the cloud provides, such as cost reduction or instance maintenance.
Atlassian is focusing future Data Center development around containers, streamlining and simplifying the move to containers and Kubernetes. This means that Kubernetes will be Atlassian's recommended deployment option for increased flexibility. These enhancements foresee areas of opportunity involving greater automation possibilities and better management, scalability, and resiliency, and in the case of the Atlassian Disaster Recovery Plan, it will guarantee better control.
As the first step to these promises, the new versions of Jira Software, Jira Service Management, Confluence, and Bamboo are already a reality, in which Automation for Jira becomes a native feature, among other details. Let's explore them in more detail:
Automation for Jira helps to perform no-code automation and allows users to extend Jira's capabilities. It's an app that allows users to automate and facilitate management for administrators. Automation supports as many use cases as scenarios exist, such as synchronizing issues, smart issues assigning, tracking SLAs, automating project actions (with Projectrak), synchronizing the issue lifecycle between Jira Service Management and Jira Software, and more. In addition, among its benefits, it offers:
Teams autonomy: It's not always feasible to customize workflows for each team separately. Instead, creating standardized templates that allow teams to keep working without significant changes is more effective. With the rule builder, Project Managers can set up powerful automation rules to manage different types of scenarios to increase team efficiency.
Team's work management ease: Automation can generate significant traffic loads, for an instance, requiring special attention since it's necessary to build processes and rules to scale the tool appropriately.
With these new Data Center versions, Atlassian is committing to large enterprise teams to scale responsibly and thus grow securely without sacrificing performance.
This update establishes a foundation for continuous improvement in future releases from a security, performance, and automation standpoint. What has improved in these new versions?
Jira security is improved. Atlassian claims this is the most secure Jira Software version to date. They have updated third-party dependencies and resolved technical debts from the past, enhancing XSRF protection, restricting anonymous access to REST endpoints, and eliminating Java API deprecations.
Optimized performance. Every possible slowdown in the processes carried out by the user and the client has been removed, ensuring the number of comments on an issue won't slow down page loading, improving the display of issues with deferred scripts helping pages load faster, and more. Check the documentation for more information.
Automation for Jira is native to Jira. The app will be free in the Atlassian Marketplace for users who haven't yet upgraded to new versions. That is, as long as a Jira Data Center license is compatible, the app is valid at no additional cost until you upgrade to Jira 9.0 or later, which will come natively, allowing you to synchronize issues, assign tasks intelligently, track SLAs, establish advanced processes in an automated way, communicate seamlessly between different instances, and in the case of Jira Service Management 5.0 improves how SLAs are calculated, streamlining the process of sending notifications to interested parties.
These new updates have generated expectations among users because of their improvements. Learn more about the details by reading the Jira Software 9.0 Release Notes and those of Jira Service Management 5.0.
This new version of the wiki offered by Atlassian has as its main feature the Long Term Support (LTS), which provides access to critical security, stability, data integrity, and performance fixes during the two-year life of the Server option.
This new version also offers improved password encryption, enhanced security with the implementation of OAuth 2.0, increased DB support, the establishment of retention rules to automatically delete historical pages and their versions, use of multiple identity providers, installation of the Data Center version in Kubernetes, installation of new versions without downtime, importing events from an existing calendar, and more. Get to know everything this new Confluence version offers.
Atlassian's main goal with this new Bamboo version is to help teams compile, test and deploy code more securely with robust performance and a modernized look and feel.
Bamboo 9.0 for Data Center is focused on optimizing security through Plataform6, allowing updating the third-party dependency stack and solving technical debts, offering greater peace of mind regarding software security issues. In addition to enabling the Bamboo Specs feature that works with Bitbucket, Atlassian has also introduced a modern and intuitive design, including new views, drop-down menus, and more user-friendly REST API documentation. Another improvement has created a more stable and functional integration between Bamboo Data Center and Server with Bitbucket Cloud by using webhooks to reduce resource utilization. Everything you need to know about this new version is here.
Like the new version of Confluence, Bitbucket 8.9 Data Center will also offer the Long Term Support (LTS) service; this release is planned for Q1 2023. In addition to this service, you will also get:
If, after reading the details of each of these new products and checking the Atlassian Data Center roadmap, you have more doubts, or you aren't sure about how to perform this implementation, contact us. We offer a wide range of services focused on Atlassian products at all levels, which you can rely on to solve your problems.
We recognize that performing a version upgrade for your Atlassian Data Center products or even migrating to the cloud might generate additional work. It's usually a process that must be executed thoroughly, so contact us if you have any doubts.
We're a team of Atlassian Certified Professionals who have performed dozens of upgrades. Those experiences will be helpful to adequately help you meet your needs and achieve your team and business goals using Atlassian products.
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