To all Atlassian server champions - we want to hear from you

[Dalectric]

Can I point out that the timing of the upgrade is terrible for us in the UK (and probably many other countries in the world). We have budgets set out from April to March so don't have scope to change that until after March 2021.

If we upgrade before Feb 2021 we can take advantage of lower prices, but the cost increase for our Confluence server (3x current cost) is well above what we have as a contingency. If we upgrade after Feb 2021 the price increase is 5x higher.

This also doesn't take into account the current financial climate where we are under enormous pressure to minimise our costs.

I implore Atlassian to at least delay this decision by another year to allow us to budget accordingly.

[Vicky Blease]

Hear, hear!

[Alex Janes]

@Cameron Deatsch Respectfully, it's been two days since anyone has been responding to customer concerns on this forum. That bothers me a lot, considering how DEEPLY impactful this decision affects your customer base.

I can only hope that this silence is because you and your team has decided that it's time to back track, and are coming up with a new plan. But frankly, the silence leaves a lot to be desired, and speaks volumes about how much Atlassian (or rather, how much they seem to not) cares about the concerns being brought up here.

I don't mean to be disrespectful. But frankly, we as a community have been disrespected and appalled by this decision. You can continue to explain how "the cloud is the future" all you want. But your customer base has made it VERY CLEAR that you and your team are NOT ready to convince us all of that. And there just are use cases for on-premise that will NEVER be in the cloud.

I think I speak for everyone here when I say, you only have a few options...

1. Bring back server

2. Lower the cost of entry for datacenter

3. Face the PR nightmare of all of your customers revolting

That's not a threat. That's just what everyone here is saying. I'm just reiterating it.

Take us seriously.

[Cameron Deatsch]

Alex, sorry for my delayed response as I had many customer meetings yesterday and was unable to get to the outstanding questions on this thread. I hope to respond to everyone's questions by the end of the week. 

We take all the feedback from the community seriously and are rapidly capturing all of it and discussing it. I will tell you, we are not going to reverse this decision to cease the sales of new Server licenses in February. I know this is not what many on this thread want to hear.

However, there are many things we can do to address the feedback all have you provided on this thread. 

And I hate to be a broken record here, but the best thing you can do is continue to provide clear feedback on where our cloud offerings don't meet your needs. You mention use cases that will never be in the cloud. I'd love to hear them.

[Alex Janes]

For me, we work with providers that require us to keep the data on-premise. There is nothing in our contracts that allows for me to host the data outside of my control. You can talk about Atlassian Trust all you want. That doesn't convince my providers its ok.

@Cameron Deatsch what annoys me right now though, is I know you have been reading this thread. So, I really feel like I shouldn't have to re-iterate ALL of the MANY use cases that people have already given you for why they can't be in the cloud.

This list of links below is just SOME of the use cases people have explained JUST IN THIS THREAD!!! I could list more, and even go into other threads and give you more, but how are all of these not good examples of why the cloud doesn't work for us?

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Atlassian-Cloud-Migration/Re-Re-To-all-Atlassian-server-champions-we-want-to-he/qaq-p/1509086/comment-id/431#M431

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Atlassian-Cloud-Migration/Re-Re-To-all-Atlassian-server-champions-we-want-to-he/qaq-p/1509122/comment-id/435#M435

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Atlassian-Cloud-Migration/Re-To-all-Atlassian-server-champions-we-want-to-hear-f/qaq-p/1509246/comment-id/439#M439

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Atlassian-Cloud-Migration/Re-To-all-Atlassian-server-champions-we-want-to-hear-f/qaq-p/1509120/comment-id/434#M434

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Atlassian-Cloud-Migration/Re-Re-To-all-Atlassian-server-champions-we-want-to-he/qaq-p/1512734/comment-id/586#M586

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Atlassian-Cloud-Migration/Re-To-all-Atlassian-server-champions-we-want-to-hear-f/qaq-p/1510021/comment-id/477#M477

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Atlassian-Cloud-Migration/Re-To-all-Atlassian-server-champions-we-want-to-hear-f/qaq-p/1509719/comment-id/466#M466

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Atlassian-Cloud-Migration/Re-Re-To-all-Atlassian-server-champions-we-want-to-he/qaq-p/1510594/comment-id/521#M521

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Atlassian-Cloud-Migration/Re-Re-To-all-Atlassian-server-champions-we-want-to-he/qaq-p/1510964/comment-id/541#M541

[ASTEN RATHBUN]

Cameron, I'm sorry, but there's OODLES of cases mentioned as to why cloud won't work.  This is either wishing they go away, or simply ignoring them.  



Your company's approach appears to be that you know better than your customers (very Apple-like, that) and that you can code your way out of it.  Some, yes, sure.  Others, there is NO technical solution that makes cloud work on a network without internet access.   There never will be.   There's also NO scenario where we pay $42k * 5-10 networks.  

I'd rather you just come out and say that you don't want those customers as customers any more, and move on.    Put the new motto right up front and center: "#%$! the Customer"

The initial thinking here was move to data center for our bigger networks where that might be possible, but I've shared this thread with some of those decision makers.  That changed their mind quickly.   

[Ralph Olsson]

Re "I hate to be a broken record here, but the best thing you can do is continue to provide clear feedback on where our cloud offerings don't meet your needs."

I hope this is clear: where your cloud offerings don't meet my needs is that they're in the cloud, not in my local network.

It really is that simple. My CI/CD tool needs to be on my local network where it has direct, fast and uninterrupted access to my data, my IP and my app hosts.

[Alex Janes]

I will tell you, we are not going to reverse this decision to cease the sales of new Server licenses in February. I know this is not what many on this thread want to hear.

Then give us data center! It's the same bits with some HA and redundancy added on. Why do you need to restrict the on-prem software to such high prices?

And I hate to be a broken record here, but the best thing you can do is continue to provide clear feedback on where our cloud offerings don't meet your needs. You mention use cases that will never be in the cloud. I'd love to hear them.

@Cameron Deatsch This comment also speaks volumes about Atlassian's plans here. It shows that you did not do enough research or consideration about why 75% of your customers are on-premise and not shifting to the cloud. You can't just tell customers "No more on-prem" before AT LEAST understanding why all of us are upset...

Why are we having to defend on-premise when 75% of your customers are on-premise? Don't you think this is feedback you should've gathered BEFORE this decision was made? Is data center going to be a lower price soon?

You see, you've made an announcement that affects all of these people, without a plan on how to actually help a large chunk of them. Now everyone is upset, and asking what your plan for them is, and you're simply responding "Why isn't our cloud good enough? We're trustworthy" For all of the reasons outlined in this thread!

We bring up data security concerns, and you bring up Atlassian Trust. But here's the thing, you broke ALL of our trust with this announcement. So how can we actually trust you? The answer is, we can't. Trust doesn't come freely. Trust is earned, and you lost it. A webpage explaining why we should trust you isn't 'earning our trust'. That's CYA for compliance purposes.

The only way you will restore a lot of our trust is if you announce that server customers can move to data center without huge investments or recurring costs. That would be a good example of not f%&$ing the customer, and actually saving them.

[ITMAGE]

To add to this -

Creating a lower tier DC option would only help our clients if it's affordable which means it needs to be on-par with the SERVER offerings. To be clear here is what we would like to see:

• Perpetual license (not an annual license)
• 25 user license not to exceed $5000 USD

Of course there are some which can afford perpetual licenses but most of our clients are small businesses who cannot. If the above does not happen then we need to look elsewhere for growth.

I am trying to understand what the issue is here as to why Atlassian seems resistant to do so. Does Atlassian believe we will capitulate and move to the cloud or fork over the money for DC? The issue is that many of us just cannot, it's a simple as that and so why not provide the above for us? What's the big deal here!??

[Dalectric]

@Cameron Deatsch this change has clearly not been thought through properly in how it will affect many of your loyal customers and has given many of us little time to work with. I don't have the budget in this financial year to upgrade to Data Centre, and if I don't upgrade before February then we get heavily penalised with an increased cost and frankly the cost of upgrading is outrageous, even before February.

You needed to give us more warning on this of at least a year.

[Alex Janes]

I hope to respond to everyone's questions by the end of the week. 

@Cameron Deatsch I hate to be that guy, but it's well past the end of last week. There are still a lot of unanswered questions on this forum. You said this quote, and then once again went quiet. Not one additional question answered.

This is not a small change. This is MASSIVELY IMPACTFUL to your small and medium customer base.

It's time to start directly answering our questions, because I think the community deserves answers. We've explained the use cases that don't work for us, and all you've done is deflect.

What are you doing for the smaller customers that can not afford Data Center, and can not and WILL NOT move to the cloud?

You mention use cases that will never be in the cloud. I'd love to hear them.

We did that. I consolidated them into a neat list for you. Now its your turn to give us better answers.

EDIT: I'm trying really hard to not come off as rude or angry. But it's really hard to do that when it feels like we are communicating with a brick wall. Canned talking points, and no actual substance as to what Atlassian is going to do about this.

I said it in another thread, and I will say it again here. For a company that makes project planning software, this feels like you are throwing together all of the important details at the last minute. Almost to gauge the reaction and see if you can get away with a massive price increase.

Again, I'm trying hard not to talk like this. You didn't directly make this decision Cameron, and are just dealing with the fallout. But when we don't get answers, we are left to come up with answers on our own. It's hard to not feel like you/Atlassian are not doing anything to help us.

[Scion]

@Alex Janes 

You aren't alone here.

We're all still watching this thread, waiting, hoping, for some sort of update or at least acknowledgment that something will be done to even attempt to address our concerns.

Unfortunately, that has not happened yet.

[Alex Janes]

Also tagging...

@Stephen Sifers

@Bryan Mayo 

@Maggie 

@Earl McCutcheon 

You all made a handful of posts on this topic (in various threads), and then went silent.

Yes, Earl, you answered my question, that non-profits are getting a better deal "soon™". Great. I hope those details actually come out soon, with enough time for me to start planning things.

But, that still doesn't answer to the many other use cases documented here. I may not be at a non-profit the rest of my life. I may decide to work for a corporation looking into a solution like this. I will know to steer them away from Atlassian if this is how they plan massive changes like this. I think everyone here agrees that they will steer small/medium customers away now that we know this is how you treat them.

Our use cases are not invalid. This new pricing is absurd for smaller customers.

The community is not getting the answers it deserves. We deserve more than "Well give us your feedback." We've done that. But beyond that, No! You should've collected this feedback before this MASSIVELY IMPACTFUL decision was made. Not after.

We need you to start picking up the pieces of this mess and get us all some real answers from the people who can make decisions. "Why not the cloud?" isn't good enough. You have enough feedback here from plenty of customers to tell you that you need to make some changes to your plan. Go get those decisions made, and deliver us some real answers on what your plan is to address this issue.

You don't have to come back to us with, "Alright, here's the new, LOWER, pricing on data center." or "Alright, here's server back." What we need you to do is give us a concrete plan on what you are going to work on to fix this.

We, as smaller customers, feel like our voices don't matter right now. We need you to fix that.

[Scion]

I wrote a (self-hosted) Confluence blog post about how this change affects us and other adult content creators.
The site and the ones connected to it are SFW, but do talk professionally about adult content:
https://studiowhy.net/wiki/display/BLOG/2020/10/26/The+Tyranny+of+the+ToS

There is no future for creators like us if companies continue to move to the cloud and, like Atlassian, don't even want us to be a part of their cloud.

[Ralph Olsson]

Like @Scion I'm waiting and hoping, but I'm not hopeful. I've rather assumed from the tone of the responses we've had so far that if I'm unable to move to Cloud and too small (100 users) to move to Data Center, then Atlassian no longer wants my company as a customer.

[Alex Janes]

@Cameron Deatsch 

@Stephen Sifers 

@Bryan Mayo 

@Earl McCutcheon 

Hey guys! You are still ignoring LOTS of questions here. Your team started this thread. You can't just leave us like this...

Are you just abandoning us all?

Very respectful to your customers. Top notch. /sarcasm

At this point, I don't feel sorry for being rude. You are being incredibly disrespectful to us by leaving us all hanging like this. Especially while we all still have VERY SERIOUS CONCERNS about the moves you have made, and continue to explain that you have lost all of our trust.

Have you not noticed that most, if not all of the customers here have not been happy with your answers, and are still asking questions? And you still expect us to trust you and move our stuff to the cloud? HOW?! Like, how are you still sitting there saying, "This is fine."

Very much continuing to "F%&$ the customer" here...

EDIT...

However, there are many things we can do to address the feedback all have you provided on this thread. 

Ok, then do that!

[Dalectric]

I believe they've tried to summarise their response to feedback so far on this post

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Feedback-Forum-discussions/An-update-on-your-top-questions-and-concerns-about-our-recent/td-p/1527058

[Mike Rathwell]

I saw this question posted and (somewhat) purposefully sat it out a bit to see the prevailing view to this. The other reason was to think about how to answer the question as this is, most definitely, bigger than a breadbox. This is likely going to be a rather long post (long enough that I wrote it in Google Docs to guard against losing it in case Something Bad Happens).

So… Where to start…

As I looked through all the various posts, it seemed like it boils down to a couple of things; cost and function.

Of the two, the one that might be the easiest to dispense with is cost.

In my world, will this cost me more? Yup. However, I have been and am at a place that spends far more on things that, to my tiny mind, return rather less than even what the increased cost of the New World Order will be. The increased cost, for me, won’t necessarily be a Thing as going cloud has been and continues to be “suggested” and the extra spend will not be unexpected. For those where annual spend is more of a concern, I do note that Atlassian is paying attention to this even if they aren’t necessarily saying “Ok… we will give you all your things back. My bad.”, and perhaps this feedback would filter up to address this. None of us are being expected to assume the higher cost immediately and there is a good grace period.

When looking at function, we are now in the rather larger part of this comment. To give you a bit of background on myself to help understand why my thinking is what it is.

In my <mumble> years of being in the technical world, I have been a system administrator, designed control systems for utility power stations, designed large scale biometric systems for government and law enforcement, been senior enough to manage an entire data center and its denizens for a rather large bank, and yes, be an Atlassian Administrator. I am at a stage in my career where I have studiously worked myself back to being an Individual Contributor but considered “leadership”. The work I do has me being sought for how to do a <insert big thing> for the company and my explicit role as Atlassian Administrator lets me actually deliver some of that.

When I have been in a system administration role, I was one of those that worked in a wide variety of UNIX environments on hardware that only those of my <mumble> generation will even have heard of. Add in Linux, a tenure with super super privileges on an entire bank of Tandem Nonstop systems, and now containerization on AWS where I containerized Jira and Confluence before it was “cool”. A lot of the ability to leap around also comes from my perhaps perverse enjoyment of “shiny”. 

Why did I present all this minutia about myself? Because, as an engineer, in the classic academic sense of matriculating as an engineer and not just an appellation, one overriding approach taken previously and will work in this context is:

Go back to first principles and solve. This <thing> is made to do this <function>. It’s not where it was on <previous thing> and it maybe does it a different way but I am paid the big money to figure out how to make it do this <function>.

All of this brings us to the topic at hand: Some Big Things just changed and it’s now time to do something about it.

Cost aside, many of the comments appear to be in the “things are changing and I don’t like it” vein. While understandable and valid, things do change. If I were looking for analogs outside this discussion a couple of notable ones (among many) leap to mind. When Apple stopped putting headphone jacks on iPhones, the entire world lost their minds. Apple is still selling lots of iPhones. When Microsoft release Windows 8, people lost their minds because no Start button. Microsoft caved and basically added a Start button to Windows 8. I was sad to see that. I was an early 8 adopter at work so it had to work and loved it. Microsoft had what I found to be a real environment that handled both tablet and desktop functions well and could be both as one moved from place to place. I was sad to see that capitulation but Windows 10 is still the predominant desktop OS.

A “non-imposed” change I tried to effect was a spectacularly successful POC but fell flat for purely emotional reasons. I noticed that my working life was largely on a browser so… was there a way to live day-to-day on ChromeOS? The answer turned out to be yes as proven by two years of exclusive ChromeOS as my daily driver. In my case, even as a system administrator, only small alterations were needed to do so. I was able to have a powerful Chromebox to use at my desk and also a Chromebook should I need to venture away. All the things were always there and at a cost about ⅔ the cost of a typical laptop provided. Lower maintenance effort, good central management and little chance of data loss. Would anybody move? No.

At my shop, I have heard the “Why aren’t we on Cloud” refrain for a few years given the (apparent) mindset of “SaaS All The Things”. Periodically, I would do a review to see if I could be cloudy primarily to address the refrain but secondarily because I am not averse to it. While we are not a large in numbers Atlassian shop, we are huge in diverse functionality and I am the only Atlassian Administrator. Along with the usual technical suspects, basically nothing moves here without a Jira issue attached including in Marketing, Content, Design, Creative, Social, Legal, all facets of Finance, and HR. Each of them have their own needs and I strive to make Jira and Confluence feel like “home” to them which has led to a very high and happy adoption rate. Our Legal department, to a person, thinks that every legal firm should run on Jira and our Marketing PgM commented that she “couldn’t be successful without my tools” and “I got my lunch hour back”. With that level of complexity and also being a full stack engineer that has built out the environment from an empty AWS environment up to all that, not having to look after the operating environment and keeping things up to date has its attractions.

Until recently, the assessment of going to the cloud has been bounced very quickly on purely technical assessments. For an environment as customized and tuned as ours, there simply wasn’t enough function available in the cloud, mostly a case of key apps simply not there at all.

This time it’s different but not because of the recent announcement.

In between formal assessments of whether to go cloudy or not, I keep an eye on what of my “needs” have become wispy, as it were. Since I did my last assessment, enough items are “there” now that I am looking at it from a different perspective. While before a review took a matter of days and closed because X number of key items weren’t there, X has gotten small enough that a deeper dive is needed. As such, I started with a legal review of the ToS quite some time before this ostensibly contentious announcement. If they bounce it, then I have my answer and direction; on prem. If they don’t, then this deeper technical dive is in order.

To be very clear, I am not expecting to come in and make a pass/fail on a 100% like-for-like set of functionalities. For the “misses”, I will be taking a “first principles and solve” assessment of “can I do <this thing> a different way?” approach. If it looks like I can, even where there is a materially different way for <this thing>, my user base trusts me and will work with me to make it happen.

My next steps will be a series of decision gates.

The first gate is whether legal passes the Cloud ToS. If they do, then I do the deeper dive into Cloud to see if I can deliver the function needed to my user base. The second gate is whether the deeper dive says I can, indeed, deliver the functionality needed in Cloud or not. If I can, then the heavy lift to migrate will start. If it seems I can only provide expected function on-prem, the third and final gate is to pragmatically decide if I move to DC or ride the less expensive server train as far as Atlassian will let it go.

Assuming I do end up staying on-prem, I am not likely to remain on Server Edition regardless. The number of DC apps I definitely need are all there now. Migration to DC would be relatively simple as I could lazy out and start with just running DC single node. Make more new stuff later. That said, while my reliability has been stellar, it figuratively keeps me up at night worrying about AWS losing the AZ my docker host is running in. I do have the production database configured multi-AZ and I do have a tested mitigation plan but I would rather not do that. Given that Jira and Confluence are literally mission critical to the shop, multi-AZ resilience is important. Less important in my shop, but shiny, is the ability to spin nodes as load comes on when needed. As such, I was fortunate to have already primed leadership that the Atlassian stack was going to cost more as I approach maintenance renewal next May even before this announcement.

Given all the above, I had already started the conversation on going one of the two avenues available in the Atlassian announcement, even though we are a relatively small shop, based on sound reasons. As I move forward on this journey to a destination either among the clouds or on the firmament, along with the engineering maxim of “go back to first principles and solve”, I will also follow my other approach best typified by a quote by Robert A. Heinlein: “Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it.”

[Dalectric]

An interesting post, but I don't agree with all of it, for a start I've seen very little of people complaining that something is changing and we don't like it. People are complaining that the changes have a significant impact on their business and use case.

From my review of the posts and comments on these forums I'm seeing the following common themes

1. We cannot move to cloud because we need to have our data on prem
2. For those that need to stay on prem the cost increase to move to data centre is prohibitive and there is not enough time to plan a budget accordingly.
3. Cloud doesn't offer the functionality we need, or allow control of the application to prevent functionality being lost/broken

[Thomas Dörfler]

Mike,

"go back to first principles and solve"

surely this is a sound principle. Funny enough, we were at that point two years ago. Due to our samll company growing we found we need a better way to steer projects than "let's sit together and see what to do next".

Two years ago, we roughly evaluated some software packages which looked promising. Due to its reputation, we jumped on Jira, a decision we were happy with. We invested a fair amount of time and money to really get productive with this system. We also had to overcome some personal dislikes, but that's always to be expected.

Now two big things have changed for us with Jira:

- The future outlook: we really expected to have a stable, reliable, evolving(!!!) basis for our business, not something with sharp edges and a revolution.

- Security: We store most of our knowledge in Jira, and part of our customers' knowledge (aside from personal data, which is its own issue in Europe). We decided that we can trust such a system, when it is located on our own private server, behind our firewall and with some monitoring. When moving to cloud, we understand that our data currently will be moving around the world to be processed by add-ons. That's ... technically cool, but untrustworthy from a security point of view. (I know, that Atlassian states to work on this... when will we see that done?)

So, back to your statement: "go back to first principles and solve". We will wait for 2-3 months, maybe our complaints here make Atlassian ... think, learn and reevaluate (I really would love it!). And then we will go back and solve: Look for the SW system, that fits our needs.

A cloud based Jira will most likely drop off the list rather soon. Unfortunately...

[Mike Rathwell]

To both @Thomas Dörfler and @Dalectric , I too am in the state where I am determining first whether I can go off-prem with my data (figuratively; I already host my on-prem server on AWS). That was the legal question I have in front of our attorneys at the moment. Only after THAT do I start to do the deeper technical dive to determine if I even can be cloudy.

I am jumping on this early because I had a Cloud/DC move proposed already with the one pager initial budget chased up the chain. I do agree with all that this is, eventually, going to be a big nut to swallow; Cloud/DC are loosely the same cost to me and that cost is ~2X what I pay now for maintenance renewals under cloud.

I could be reading the announcement wrong but, aside from the hard stop on new licenses next weekend, we can still pay our current support for another 3 years.

I did look long and hard at that 3 year thing and the caveat that concerns me about taking that route (and haven't seen it spelled out) is if the stop of server license sales also equals a stop of server add-ons. My environment is pretty stable in that regard but about once a year someone comes to me with an OMG this is critical need that, to deliver, sometimes takes a new add on. 

I do agree with you that the price increase, especially for smaller and/or non-profits is onerous. I am fortunate in that a planned cost bump to go cloudy or DC was in the cards and I am a size that fits the current license model. I also agree with you that I would hope that Atlassian would look at the pricing structure even if it means just extending the qualifications for Academic level pricing along with some of the smaller tiers.

In the few times I've had a chance to talk to the PdMs, I have commented that "small" does not equal a simplistic system. There does seem to be an underlying assumption that a smaller environment is also simpler which, aside from data privacy concerns, would be just fine on Cloud. That is not always a true statement.

[Mike Rathwell]

Update 10/29/20: Legal have just given a provisional "approval" needing only InfoSec blessing now that, should I find a way to do it, I could move cloudy.

More on this festival as it progresses.

[Jörg Godau]

@Cameron Deatsch how many of Atlassian‘s own services and teams internally don't use your saas-cloud offering? I know this to be a non-zero integer.

Why don't your teams all use your SaaS-Cloud?

Where do you document financially relevant and sensitive materials - mergers and acquisitions? Plans to cancel server? Etc.?

Perhaps the answers to your questions are available internally, if you cannot or will not understand our reasons or the reasons of our customers?

I love Atlassian, I've loved them since way back when I was a developer at a 16 person company in early 2000s. I've sold them to major companies and tiny shops, all of them and Atlassian profited. Right now I'm sitting on 10000/unlimited user licences...

On reflection many things are clearer - higher targets for partners, cloud targets, Atlassian recruiting own sales and enablement staff.

I want to believe, so many of us customers and partners want to believe.

But I don't think we can anymore and that makes me very sad.

The future is cloud

A privileged push for rightness

My heart is bleeding

[Julius Zatroch]

I think Atlassian dont understand what's "Enterprise cloud". Only available option for us is to create own SERVER software instance in Azure, AWS or Google, secure it with OWN software firewall and connect VPNs to company infrastructure. We cannot depent on Atlassian in terms of security. Look on this table:  https://stack.watch/product/atlassian/jira/   Every year higher numbers of JIRA vulnerabilities - 45 this year.....

Lets add server versions to AWS Marketplace and MAYBE we can think about transition to cloud, but "our cloud"... 

[Mike Rathwell]

@Julius Zatroch that determination is precisely where I am right now. As much as the lazy human in me would like it if I could go cloud (both privacy and technically), I may well yet end up building out a shiny new AWS DC environment in place of my existing AWS server environment.

If it ends up being the DC route, since my DB is already multi-AZ, I am facing only a move from EBS to EFS, licensing, and adding nodes as I see fit.

Gosh... come to think of it, that seems MUCH easier :)

[Julius Zatroch]

Hello @Cameron Deatsch  and others Atlassians. As is your own status on Atlassian charity donations, you have 61000+ 10$ licenses now. What about to increase price to 100$  ?  I think nearly everybody can pay it per year. It will give you more like 6000000 $....  Should be enough to leave server line alive.

[christophecariou]

Hi,

Most of our atlassian products deployments are inside internal private networks. By this way, non authenticated users can have read only access to company knowledge, from Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket...

How can we achieve these use cases in SaaS architecture ?

Regards

[a.stucki@solcept.ch]

Cloud will be a absolute No-Go for us for the following reasons (and to @Cameron Deatsch : they are not nice to haves of some random company policy):

• no version control (in functional safety projects we do "Tool Qualification" for each version of any tool we use, if we have no control on the version because some cloud god can change the version at any time -> no good)
• data retention for many years (the 75 demanded by an aviation customer might be too optimistic, but you get the idea...)
• data protection (at the moment there is no technical (root access of cloud admins) or legal (EU laws, not even pinning works) solution on the "legal" side, in addition it is difficult to convince security-minded customers of the security of cloud solutions -> no good)

I see this as an opportunity for a nifty competitor of Atlassian to catch a nice bit of the market ;-)

[Vicky Blease]

I'm the server champion in my office, and I'm now tasked with finding a replacement solution for Confluence and Jira. It's bad enough that you've landed this 'big reveal' on us, but to now want increased licenses on server products year on year till 2024 is just an insult. Our costs have literally doubled overnight.

So genuine question to the other server champions - what alternative products do you recommend for on premise help desk and wiki solutions? I'm all ears.

[Sven]

Clever people already opened a community platform for this:

https://bye-bye-server.com/

(on github everybody can add other suggestions)

Our current favourites are XWiki or Bluespice (MediaWiki with some Addons).

https://bluespice.com/

[Vicky Blease]

hahaha - fantastic!

[Fabian Arndt]

wrong place

[Vicky Blease]

Seems Atlassian are adopting Trumpian tactics and deleting posts they don't approve of.

Classy,

[Stephen Sifers]

Hello Vicky,

I can assure you we're not deleting posts, most of the time posts become caught in our spam filter and it requires manual interaction to take them out of spam. I checked your profile and am not seeing any removed posts and no items caught in spam currently.

Please let us know if you're still missing content or a post of yours is not visible.

Respectfully,
Stephen SIfers

[Julius Zatroch]

Cutting off small customers is very bad idea. They are generating small amound of money but huge market potential and new customers in future. And im not talking about Atlassian partners too....   Look here what happened to another IT company LOGMEIN,  https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/LOGM/ .  They cut off small userbase in 2018, we have been forced to find alternative and after 2 years is stock price of LOGMEIN only 1/2.....

[Rami Khader]

I am adding my voice to other voices here specially who are in the non-profit sector. 
We have around 350 users currently using Jira and confluence up from 70 two years ago. Most of the users are non-IT one and the majority of use cases are not related to IT. Cloud for now is not an option for security and data privacy reasons so we are having only the data center option. 

I still didn't hit the panic button internally, I will wait until Feb 2021 to see what other options we will going to have and take it from there. 

it is hard to justify for management the increase of the cost from $0 to $xxx without showing them any added values. From their perspective, it is still Jira they don't care if it is data center or hosted on the cloud. 

[Luke Johnson]

We're out unfortunately. I'm going to be planning the exit soon I suppose.

We're a small IT MSP company (less than 50 staff). We've got an internal Confluence server instance (50 user license). A fairly customised wiki with lots of data ingestion from various tools and systems.

However, its my 2000 user Confluence server instance. We run Scroll Viewport and a number of plugins that aren't supported in cloud to deliver a user portal for our end customers. It only happens to be the lifeblood of our customer experience. It's only been live for just over a year. We were half through going live last year when the price hikes were announced and that really pissed off my CEO, because we had to bring forward the purchase a fair way to make the deadline.

I pushed the Confluence route because of our internally familiarity with it of 10+ years and its flexibility to deliver what we needed.

We can't possibly afford the datacenter version, nor do we need HA. Are you or are you not getting rid of DC too? It's the same codebase so why would you get rid of one and not the other?

2020 already hasn't been a great year. Now it looks like 2021 is going to be stressful and expensive while I find another platform and migrate to.

Well done for living up to 'don't f*** the customer'...

[Fabian A_ Lopez _Community Leader - Argentina_ Florida_ California_]

@Luke Johnson  I fully understand your pain. I was in the approval process to achieve the same that you are describing, created a pilot, a proof of concept got pre-approval, and even seamlessly integrated Confluence to a Learning Management System (EduBrite) and of course I was in the middle of writing an article about it.

So, after hundreds of hours in meeting and building the pilot to satisfy requirements, I have to undo to re do it based on cloud limitations. A new journey ahead, of course with a different amount.

Like you, I have a few years using Confluence (am using it since 2009) and I really like it, more with it is combined with K15t products and EduBrite. Best wishes on your new journey with the hope that 2020 is gone soon.

[Luke]

@Fabian A_ Lopez _Community Leader - Argentina_ Florida_ California_ You got the wrong guy.

[Fabian A_ Lopez _Community Leader - Argentina_ Florida_ California_]

ooops sorry about it ;)

[Luke Johnson]

@Fabian A_ Lopez _Community Leader - Argentina_ Florida_ California_ Yep and I think the notion of 'you've got a few years' is rubbish in practice. Who knows when the developers who write the plugins will stop writing bugfixes etc for Server. I can almost guarantee it will be well before 2024.

[Thomas Dörfler]

Today I had a few minutes to rescan this forum and the messages. I tried to look at Atlassians enthusiasm for its cloud technology.

From a technical point of view, Atlassian might be right: Having a central, professional administration for the valuable data we all put into our Jira instances, having constant improvement, added functionality is ... cool. yes.

But from a legal/contractual point of view, moving to Atlassian's cloud requires constant monitoring: It starts with "Atlassian Data Processing Addendum": This Addendum points to a list of subprocessors in Australia, Ireland, Germany, the US. And this list may (=will!) change through time. When it changes, you can reject the change by closing down your Jira cloud instance. Additionally, when legal framework changes (like invalidating the privacy shield... what will the next 10 years bring in international data law?) you have to reinvestigate: Are we still ... safe?

So from my point of view, moving to Atlassian's cloud will make our server admins obsolete (no, not really ;-) ). But we have to add a few IT lawyers to our staff, which will monitor. And possibly enforce us to leave the Atlassian cloud.

Wow, what a change.

And, BTW: in the beginning we didn't want to enter the cloud anyway!

[Haddon Fisher]

Adding my voice to the multitudes. This decision infuriates me because...

1) I don't like being lied to. Atlassian says the rationale is to "focus on Cloud" but the Server and Data Center codebases are the same and they say they're not getting rid of Data Center. This makes negative sense: if you are keeping Data Center then, unless I'm missing something big, you are not gaining any efficiencies by dropping server.

2) I don't like transparent money grabs. If the answer is not focusing on Cloud, what could it be? Well after doing the cost comparison, it seems pretty obvious: Data Center and Cloud are more expensive and involve higher recurring costs!

My costs for DC are not dramatically higher; Data Center would actually allow us to step down a user tier (Server doesn't have a 1k option), so while the yearly full-cost renewal is a kick in the downstairs and we get absolutely no needed benefit from Data Center it's at least something I think I can get management to agree to. For fun, I did also cost out Cloud, and just the platform alone costs about double what we pay (including add-ons) for Server. Even if it was an option from a technical perspective, I'd get laughed out of the room presenting it at this price.

3) I don't like being ignored. I have had the luck to speak with a great many Atlassian people over my 10+ years of administering their products, and every single time Cloud comes up, I hear "Oh Cloud is great, why haven't you switched yet?". And every....single...time...I give them the exact same answer "well that new UI you got is atrocious, you can't keep making unannounced and uncontrolled changes to the platform, its slower than my self-hosted Server, and about 60% of my add-on functionality (the 60% I really can't do without) doesn't work on Cloud yet. The pricing is also outrageous. Oh, and did I mention that the UI is garbage?".

It's been like 8 years of this feedback and I think half of one of those things has been addressed. Super glad you spent all that time on the UI though, I'm sure lots of people really like it.

4) I don't like being treated like I'm stupid. Atlassian has treated me like a valued customer for the years I've been one, and so I really wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. Yes, I was boiling with rage about this decision, but one of your company values is literally "Don't !@&^$ the customer" so I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt. I reached out directly, explained why I felt this was a bad decision, and listed some specific functionality I would need to even begin considering Cloud. Your response was a slightly better-worded version of "well add-on functionality has nothing to do with us, so we really wouldn't know when they plan on fixing their product...but you should totally switch, it's a much better option for you!" You expect me to believe that it's a developer's choice to have one vastly inferior add-on for Cloud, not to mention the sheer joy of maintaining a second codebase, documentation, and support? And nothing to do with the fact that Cloud simply does not give them the option to do whatever it is they're trying to do? And you've had however many years to address it, haven't, and it's their problem?

At the end of the day, you gotta do you. If you dislike those jabronis on the Server team and want to fire them, are getting pressure from your new corporate overlords to "do the SaasS thing because my money mattress isn't full enough" or just care more about the population on Cloud, so be it. That's your call. My call is whether I am going to continue to be an Atlassian advocate and customer.

[Alex Janes]

I don't like being treated like I'm stupid. 

Atlassian, we're not stupid. We're system administrators. We know how your software works. We know that data center is just server with HA bits added on.

So don't act like this is some efficiency move. Because it isn't.

[Steven F Behnke]

The only way we able to build solutions was because of the on premise hosting and low price. 

I literally run small jiras even today. I don't need data center for a 50 user app! Wtf. And they cannot be cloud because of compliance rules that people can go to jail for. There's absolutely no where for me to go except some other product now.

Time and time again you make moves that make it clear my choice to work with Atlassian software was wrong. 

[Taylor Huston]

I'm looking into https://www.openproject.org/, for some smaller personal stuff. I like that it's open source. There is a paid for version, but even at it's most expensive tier it's a fraction of Data Center's cost.

[Vicky Blease]

This looks really good Taylor, thanks for the share.

[Steven F Behnke]

I guess it's time for some of us to find a new career. I fail to see room for me with Atlassian anymore. I should have seen the writing on the wall a long time ago, with the deterioration of their Development Kit to their split of products to Cloud and Server and Data Center. The insistence that every conversation start about Cloud even though I firmly believe that there still exist on premise-only usecases.

I was always worried about the risk of centering on a particular variety of software like the Atlassian suite, but as they are hell bent on screwing those that have helped build their business on their platform I guess sticking around at this point amounts to masochism. 

"One of our core values is “Don’t #@!% the Customer,” and we will be sensitive to customers facing challenges due to COVID-19."

LOL yall really take the piss

[Taylor Huston]

I mean, we should have known better than to put all of our eggs in one basket anyway. There will still be work for us for the next few years, even if it's supporting Cloud instances, but I am personally glad that I have been doing a lot of AWS administration lately. I'm going to work on getting those certs and spend the bulk of 2021 trying to transition into more of a Cloud Solutions Architect/SRE role at my current company. We're on Jira Data Center, and that's probably not going to change anytime soon, but I probably won't work for this company forever so it's definitely time to branch out.

[iS2 Admin]

So, after a >10 years journey with Atlassian server software this is the end. No, it's not enough that you have increased maintenance pricing massively over the past few years. Now you're putting off most european small and mid size copmanies.

As you might have already heard, there are some regulations about privacy and data processing in Europe. After the EU privacy shield was blast away, there is no more reuglar base for processing data outside the EU. This seems not the right moment to enforce customers to migrate their data to unsafe 3rd party countries where your datacenteres are located.

As with german IT security laws there is a wide range of heavily regulated sectors which rely on trustfully data processing. Without the according ISMS certifications (ISO27001, BSI Grundschutz, C5) and an european venue of the contractors there is no way into the cloud for most of them. It is to be expected that German authorities will take harder action in the near future.

Even if there would be a legal and compliant way to move into the cloud, plenty of companies won't give their crown jewels stored in Atlassian tools away. So won't we...

And sorry, DC is not an acceptable offer for us. Costs would be exploding with DC.

For us it's the starting point for moving away from Atlassian. We definitely have to look out for better alternatives.

[David Willson]

Re posting to this thread so that others here could see my message to @Cameron Deatsch 

---Post

Hey @Cameron Deatsch 

Thanks for checking out our website.

Yep we are in the cloud business and I do think that cloud is the direction that the majority of companies and governments are going.

Professionally, we have strict requirements around where data can live. In the cloud, answering the question 'where does the data live?" becomes much more complicated then with on-prem solutions. Specifically with Atlassian, data can be in Atlassian's cloud, or stored in vendor clouds depending on the apps you buy from the marketplace.

The commitment that Atlassian is moving to cloud is so clear, from the investor letter we know how big the forgotten middle is 30 000, ~16% and the fact that 75% of Atlassian customers have some sort of on prem. The letter also says that Atlassian now has a billion dollar loan, to continue the cloud train. Cloud is the future for Atlassian it has the resources are there to make it happen and underlying all of that is the culture to support the transition. Cloud is where Atlassian is going, and that makes so much sense to me.

I think it would have been a different story if Atlassian had announced that all on prem was going to the cloud; Server + Datacenter. At least then it would make sense. My guess is that the 80/20 rule applies, and that data center customers generate significant revenue so an abrupt shift of DC to the cloud would be financially apocalyptic.

Personally, my main challenge isn't the simple question of what is preventing us to going to the cloud, its the cognitive dissonance that comes with the abrupt decision to discontinue server, mandate cloud, and provide no cost effective data center option.

1) Atlassian has said for years 'can't do it all' that’s why there is a marketplace and a ecosystem of people who can make the features that won't get done by Atlassian. Now the message is 'we have time and we can do it all for you in the cloud'.
2) Atlassian is a large proponent of Agile, and agile isn't about the big bang its about the gradual organic growth. This is a big bang approach feels more like waterfall then Agile to me.
3) Atlassian is now asking for Trust to go to cloud, immediately after breaking it by signaling that they aren’t willing to help the forgotten middle get with an affordable DC option.

It feels like this:

Surely for the 30 000 of the forgotten middle an affordable data center tier could be created. Doesn't it just make sense to keep customers? Don't the researchers say its something like 5x-7x more expensive to get new customers over keeping existing ones? Atlassian knows that the forgotten middle are some of the most loyal and the first to advocate for Atlassian products. So why forget them?

Would offering the forgotten middle an affordable option, rewarding them for their patronage, loyalty and support that has allowed Atlassian grow to where it is today be so bad?

@Cameron Deatsch  could you send my letter to the founders? I would love them to read it.

Please imagine you are in the forgotten middle, and what this would feel like.

Ref: Shareholder letter - https://s2.q4cdn.com/141359120/files/doc_financials/2021/q1/TEAM-Q1-2021-Shareholder-Letter.pdf

Ref: My Letter - https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-articles/An-Open-Letter-Atlassian-s-Forgotten-Middle-re-The/ba-p/1510036

[Luke Johnson]

@David Willson seems like Atlassian have disappeared from or given up on this thread.

[Tom Shaffer]

They just started another thread, same as the old thread...

[David Holshouser]

I've read many but not all of the above comments.

For my company this isn't about compliance and it isn't something you can sweep away with all the cloud marketing in the world.

I'm required by customer and contract to provide configuration management to small teams in air-gapped networks in secure environments, with long term support (10 yrs).

Your offerings simply don't support a model of small teams in secure environments.

I realize most of my companies programs will be supported by DC (cloud isn't even a consideration due to the high security and criticality of our programs), but I have already received guidance to start the trade process for an alternative to Atlassian.

I don't think your very flattering letter provides any sense of relief to me after all the time I've put in fighting for your products. I've lost a considerable amount of trust and respect from my corporate staff due to this transition. Thank you but no thank you.

[Tom Shaffer]

I've lost a considerable amount of trust and respect from my corporate staff due to this transition.

Yup. A lot of us face this. And here Atlassian continues to degrade us by telling us we'll be moving to their cloud "soon" and we're just "not ready" for it... blah blah blah.

But in reality most of us can't just change over to something else in a small window of time and certainly can't put our trust in a company who seems to be ignoring questions in regards to very glaring shortcomings. On top of that, there's still a large portion of customers who simply chose the server offerings because they just can't go to the cloud. Period. No more discussion, they just can't go to it. But according to Atlassian, we just don't know what the cloud is...

I wouldn't put my own professional reputation on the line with a company who pulls that. And I'm not going to.

[Metin _savignano software solutions_]

Quoting from @Cameron Deatsch 's reply of October 17th

Lastly, on your request for lower Data Center tiers, we hear you loud and clear. At this time the entry point for Data Center is the 500 user license and we have no plans to add lower tiers.

Thanks for the clear statement. You hear us, and you will not respond. 

So Atlassian wants small and medium business customers to switch to cloud or leave for good.

[David Holshouser]

Curious if this is the perfect place to start talking about alternatives.

I'm personally leaning toward gitlab, but I'd be open to other options.

[christophecariou]

Ho David, 

Yes gitlab is an alternative.

Tuleap, xWiki,... Here are some other names...

Is Atlassian realizing they're going to lose thousands of avocates/evangelist around the World?

Very sad and disappointed

[Vicky Blease]

Someone else recommended https://www.openproject.org in another thread.

I'm waiting for my devops team to spin up a Linux server so I can trial this out. It looks like a decent replacement for our internal intranet/wiki; we would never put this on cloud infrastructure due to the sensitive content.

[Julius Zatroch]

Here is best guide for now:

https://bye-bye-server.com/ 

[Robert Ross]

Our company just did switch from on-prem to Cloud for Jira and Confluence.  We moved to GitLab instead of Bitbucket.  All the experiences have been objectively awful. First off, the migration tools are terrible, even for Atlassian's own products.  Linkages between Confluence and Jira were all broken, many plugins had to be fully reconfigured, etc.  

We switched to GitLab and have had an even more awful experience. And we're paying customers. The support is terrible, and the Bitbucket importer has massive glaring holes in capability. For example, if you do a squash merge on an old PR, the importer will not bring over any of the original commits or show a code diff. It literally brings over an "empty" MR. I 100% regret moving to GitLab right now.

Beyond all that, Atlassian's cloud products are straight-up worse than the old on-prem versions.  They have removed all sorts of capabilities that worked quite well on the old version in favor of "new" UI that are terrible.  For example:

• You can no longer reference a previously added attachment in a Jira ticket on a new comment.  You can only attach something new.
• If you reference a Jira ticket from Confluence, you no longer have the option to show only the ticket and status.  It is either the full description of the ticket (including title) or a plain link.
• Inline image management in Jira and Confluence is awful and extremely buggy.

I find it mind-boggling that Atlassian would foster this much bad will from people who used to love Atlassian products by being heavy-handed and forcing people over to an immature and objectively worse product.

[Michael Woffenden]

Agreed Robert! Cloud is an unmitigated disaster and Server/DC is delightful.

I just wonder.  How could Atlassian have gone so far astray?

[Diego Bruno]

Atlassian became Atla$$ian .. Now it prioritizes ($$) over Customers and ($$) over, Consultants and Developers thanks to whom Atla$$ian grew around the world.

Atlassian lost its essence and disappointed me

Atlassian let me down :'( 

[Tom Shaffer]

I've got the feeling that after a lot of us vote with our $$, we'll get a much more affordable option being offered to us all in the name of "you spoke and we listened." (Blech)

[Stephen Sifers]

@Diego Bruno,

Reaching out to ensure you're aware of the Rules of engagement for the Community. We've noticed you've posted this same message at least 6 other times across Community. With this said, we do value and listen to feedback, including constructive and critical feedback, however, spamming the community with the same message across multiple posts does a disservice to those expressing their actual impact and concern to Atlassian.

We'll be removing your duplicate posts and leaving this original post as-is to ensure your message is heard. We would suggest reviewing the above rules of engagement and our Atlassian Community voice and tone guide.

Regards,
Stephen Sifers

[Diego Bruno]

Thanks Stepehn, I will follow your recommendation and keep my mouth shut.

It seems that a i cant express my disagreement... it smells like some kind of censorship... 

by the way, I never did copy an paste ... I just answered different posts in a different way but expressing my disappointment with Atlassian.

Regards...

Diego

[Andrew Laden]

I also agree that this is a horrible decision by Atlassian. They are 100% *^%$*&^ the customer.

As for Atlassian telling us that we can trust them with our data. I am living proof that we cant. I was working from a company that was using atlassian's cloud product.  Atlassian Cloud had a storage failure. They had no working backups. They 100% lost all our data. We had to use emails to try to reconstruct tickets, and we lost source code that we never recovered. 

My first major project was to get us off cloud and onto on-prem. and I have never looked back.

So no, I don't trust Atlassian with our data, and I never will.

[Dalectric]

This is a worrying story, and highlights the risk of putting your data in another company's hands.

[Norbert]

I'm supporting some customers to keep their atlassian ecosystem running :-) Some days ago I already wrote some concerns. And don't wanna repeat the correct arguments I already read here. But just to understand correctly:

1. There won't be bamboo in the cloud (last try ended 01/2017), trying to integrate functionalities in bitbucket for cloud. Only chance to continue w Bamboo ist DC. Right?

2. Data residence of bitbucket is at NTT in two data centers in US, no way for customer to influence this. Right?

3. How shall I convince customers now to move to a platform with essential features announced for 2022 ?

Norbert

[gzgenm]

They don't give a F-word about how we will convince customers. So I'm not convincing nobody from this moment on.

[Heide]

Sadly, Atlassian sends the message, that they do not care about their small- to mid-size customers (far below 500 users) in industry sectors which cannot use cloud-based solutions due to regulations/security issues/... 

[gzgenm]

due to insane increase in the price LOL