Announcing new Data Center Long Term Support (LTS) releases

[#1]

Hi Data Center Community,

We’re excited to share announcements for our new Long Term Support (LTS) releases for our Data Center apps. You may have already seen that the Long Term Support releases for Jira Software, Jira Service Management, Confluence and Bamboo are now available.

Below are a few highlights, though not a comprehensive list, of all the improvements in the current and upcoming releases.

What’s new in Jira 11.3 (Now available)

• Support for OpenSearch: OpenSearch provides more advanced indexing options, which lead to less processing requirements and faster search results.

• Service Accounts: Set up non-user accounts with strict permission controls to securely automate tasks, execute scripts, and run integrations.

• Jira Data Center connector for Rovo: Enrich your Rovo knowledge base with Jira and Jira Service Management Data Center issues, projects, and work items.

• Jira Product Discovery integration for Jira Data Center: Unify your product development process, from ideation to delivery, across Data Center and Cloud with this new integration.

• Instance Optimizer for Jira: This Marketplace app acts as your built‑in control center for keeping Jira Data Center fast and stable as it grows.

What’s new in Jira Service Management 11.3 (Now available)

• Group queues to organize issues: To help agents stay focused on the issues that are critical to their teams, project admins can now group and arrange queues, which are a filtered set of issues. This enhancement streamlines agents' workflows and improves prioritization.

• Limit access to Assets data in Assets Confluence Macro: We're introducing the Assets Viewers role to the Assets Confluence Macro App. This role enhances security by helping admins allow read-only access to assets in the Confluence macro.

What’s new in Confluence 10.2 (Now available)

• Confluence Data Center connector for Rovo: Facilitate seamless data synchronization from Confluence Data Center to Rovo, allowing you to leverage Cloud-based AI capabilities ahead of a full upgrade.

• Support for OpenSearch: OpenSearch provides more advanced indexing options, which lead to less processing requirements and faster search results.

What’s new in Bamboo 12.1 (Now available)

• Service accounts: Create a special type of Data Center account for a service, integration, script, or app that needs to access Bamboo, Jira, Confluence, or other Data Center products.

• OAuth 2.0 AppLinks: Enable secure, modern, and reliable connections between Bamboo, other Atlassian products, and external applications.

• In-product diagnostics (IPD): Get the same powerful monitoring and support capabilities already available in Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket Data Center.

• Platform and security updates: Support for Java 21, Atlassian Data Center Platform 8, and upgrades Spring 6.x, Jakarta EE 10, Apache Tomcat 10.1, Apache Struts 7, and AUI 10 to enhance security and performance across the Atlassian Data Center ecosystem.

Coming soon: Bitbucket 10.2 will be available in the first half of 2026

• Merge Queues: Automatically manage and sequence pull requests, ensuring new changes are tested and merged in order to reduce conflicts and speed up delivery for software teams.

• Search Improvements: Including new repository search index insights page for admins, advanced REST tools for troubleshooting and repairing indexing, and a streamlined UI for configuring search server settings. Together, these enhancements provide greater visibility, control, and ease of management for search operations across your Bitbucket instance.

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Why upgrade to the latest Long Term Support release

Upgrading to the latest Long Term Support releases ensures your organization benefits from critical security, stability, performance fixes, and dedicated support.

With the Data Center End of Life announcement*, staying current is more important than ever to keep your organization secure and prepared as you plan your move to Cloud.

*Bitbucket Data Center will not end of life. Instead, we're launching a new license option that will allow you to keep using Bitbucket Data Center while unlocking the latest Bitbucket Cloud innovations, including AI and CI/CD, all under a single license. Contact us to learn more about your options.

Plan your upgrade today

We understand that upgrades can take some planning, so here’s a round-up of resources to help you prepare.

• Pre-upgrade planning tool

• Jira 11.3 release notes

• Jira Service Management 11.3 release notes

• Confluence 10.2 release notes
• Bamboo 12.1 release notes

We encourage you to upgrade to the latest LTS as soon as possible. If you have any questions or feedback, please leave a comment under this post.

Thanks for being part of the Data Center Community!

[Dan C]

(Genuine) Idea: Start putting out posts that notify us of when the cloud products that we're being pushed towards receive new features, that fill all the gaps that Data Center currently satisifes for us, as customers.

Moving from a truly flexible, controllable platform like Data Center, where we can satisfy practically any use-case our organization has, to a much more restricted, controlled one like cloud is incredibly difficult for organizations that have made good use of that flexibility over many years.

Showing us how Atlassian is fixing the lack of flexibility for our Atlassian admins, and lack of predictability for our users (frequent UI design changes, for example) in cloud, to bring it closer to Data Center would be a great way of encouraging Cloud adoption - rather than the brute-force method employed right now.

(Examples: groovy scripting, flexible UI modification capabilities, especially in the service desk portal, non-asynchronous workflow postfunction processing, better flexibility in scripted Assets accessibility from Jira, better uiniversal support of various field types like opsgenie-oiginated fields)

[carl]

Really appreciate this update! The new LTS releases look genuinely solid, especially the OpenSearch support and the improvements around automation and security. It’s great to see Data Center still getting meaningful upgrades while everyone prepares for the bigger shift toward Cloud.

I’m particularly excited about the performance boosts and the new integrations — they make a real difference for teams managing large instances every day. Upgrades can be a headache sometimes, but with features like these, it definitely feels worth planning for sooner rather than later.

Thanks for keeping the community informed and moving forward

[Christoph Rooms]

Hi Dan, I appreciate you taking the time to share this idea with us. Our Atlassian Cloud public roadmap is a great resource to discover recently released features and those currently in development.Since flexibility is a key concern you raised, here are some of the ways we’re making customization a central focus for the Atlassian Cloud platform…

• Customization via apps: Cloud offers more than 2x the number of Marketplace apps to customize your environment with new use cases and integrations
• Customization via AI: Rovo Studio app allows you to build no-code, custom automations, customize Assets, tailor Confluence with Company Hubs, or create custom Rovo & Virtual Service agents to perform tasks specific to your organization
• Customization via code: In cloud, we offer a hosted development platform, Forge, to handle all of your more complex customizations that aren't available out of the box with apps, or achievable with Rovo Studio.

Additionally, we regularly post improvements to our cloud platform throughout the Atlassian Community. Check out the relevant product group to stay up to date on cloud product improvements.

[Christoph Rooms]

Carl, thank you so much for your thoughtful feedback! We’re glad to hear the new LTS releases and enhancements resonate with you. We truly appreciate your engagement and support as we prepare our Data Center customers for a future in the Cloud.