Data Center or Cloud: What’s Your Long-Term Plan?

[Namita Awasthi]

With Atlassian pushing Cloud as the future, I’m curious how others are thinking about the Cloud vs Data Center decision.

We’re currently on Confluence and Jira Data Center, and while we see the advantages of Cloud (scalability, automatic updates, ecosystem improvements), there are still some strong reasons we’re staying put (for now).

For example:

• We have deep integrations with internal systems that are easier to manage on-prem
• Performance and control are critical for some business units
• Compliance and data residency requirements are easier to enforce internally
• Some macros and plugins we rely on aren’t Cloud-ready yet

That said, we’re watching the roadmap closely and re-evaluating regularly.

I’d love to hear from others:

• Are you still on Data Center? Why?
• Have you migrated to the Cloud? How did it go?
• What are the deal-breakers or tipping points for your team?

Let’s get a thread going. Real-world experiences would be super helpful for both sides of the decision.

[Vickey Palzor Lepcha]

At some stage , I think you will want to move to Cloud , considering Cloud has more and better features. There are changes in DC too , but the amount of new features that are released for Cloud versions seem to be more and frequent.

And users at some point of time start demanding those features and would get bored with the same old DC UI and limited features.

I have been using DC for quite sometime now , and Cloud for my personal use . I must say that Cloud Version gets me excited with all its features .

And also , DC kept me 50% 60 % of the time engaged as system admin/linux , which I think eats up my time as admin when I could have been exploring more of JIRA and Confluence .

[Namita Awasthi]

I agree - most new features released are not available on DC. 

[Roger]

"At some stage , I think you will want to move to Cloud , considering Cloud has more and better features."

Unfortunately the difference in features seems artificially pushed by Atlassian. So I am reading your argument as: at some stage we have to move, because Atlassian is pushing us.

[Rolf Lader]

Hello @Namita Awasthi, 

I completely agree with you.

The same reasons you mention are also motivating us to stick with the Data Center versions. I also don't see Atlassian's cloud-first strategy lasting much longer. Atlassian's sales and profits are increasing on the Data Center side, so the executive suite will not be able to maintain this cloud-first strategy with their stakeholders for much longer.

However, this does not change the fact that the advantages of a centralized approach also bring immense benefits. The resources that a company has to invest in maintaining just one cloud version of the respective applications are already significantly lower than for the many Data Center versions. 

Therefore, I believe that the cloud approach will prevail in the long term. But not in the short or medium term.

Best regards, Rolf 

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

[Urmo]

Today i say that been in cloud is easier than in DC because you don't need worried any security issues and update instance every random moment. Less admin time needed but downside on this is that sometimes some updates arrive so random that you are not really ready from them and when you are not also end users can be also suprised. But mostly Cloud is simple and more user-focused to use.

Migration was made with Atlassian Partner but mostly there was some stuff what did work in Server/DC but not needed anymore in Cloud. So there must take some time to clean up old mess and be ready to build new settings from scratch.

DC support cheaper way to backup today. In Cloud it is not so simple to do. Yes there is many partners ho can help to do it but it is more costly than sometimes you hope.

DC had more settings behind the front screen and today you can't have access to server side or into database. I did like use sql to make search directly from database. In cloud you can't do it.

Urmo

[Simone Kistner]

I completely agree with you. Same reasons here..... 

[Sake]

It's a shame to artificially cripple DC with not providing the same functionality as Cloud. I understand the drop of Server, but why not adding new features the same frequency as on Cloud? Maybe don't support old versions not to long, if that's to costly.
Our management are looking at the Cloud, but only because they believe it's better because of extra Features. But those Features could easily be implemented in DC, but Atlassian is choosing not to.

The reason for on-premises is quite simple; full control. We know who has access, we know when we update, we keep performance on par and we don't want to be a number when there are issues which only can be fixed when having backend access.

Also we have a lot of integrations and our servers aren't connected to the internet, we really don't want that because of control, security and regulations.

Edit: also the cost on Cloud is much higher...

[Roger]

I agree.
As I mentioned in another reply, someone wrote "At some stage , I think you will want to move to Cloud , considering Cloud has more and better features."

Unfortunately the difference in features seems artificially pushed by Atlassian. So I am reading that argument as: at some stage we have to move, because Atlassian is pushing us.

[Per Åge Sørvik]

We are still on local instances, much for the same reasons, deep integrations and missing plugins in cloud. Migrating to cloud is a big hassle for us, and would increase cost massively. 

Might as well look at migrating to something else.

[Marco Leist]

For us, the biggest pain point is the fact that Confluence Cloud does not support nested third-party macros in the new editor (https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-70746), as we have thousands of pages that make extensive use of them. Whether this is actually a deal breaker is questionable - but it will probably lead to massive migration efforts and frustration among our users.

[Phill Pafford]

Until they offer some sort of process where I can control, very fine grain access/permissions for deployment into a private vpc, I can't use cloud without the additional setup of an actual deployment server. There is no way security team would allow a SAAS/Cloud tool to have access to deploy. While the SAAS/Cloud could kick off the build and trigger the deployment process, we need to have some sort of server, self hosted, for deployments.

Currently we run Bitbucket DC and Bamboo DC, could move to use Bitbucket Cloud but would still need a Deployment server, such as Bamboo DC or Jenkins, unless there is another option I'm not aware of.

[Dave Thomas]

I've been an administrator of Atlassian applications for almost two decades now and currently manage several large (25-30k user) data center instances. We're in the final stages of discovery with Atlassian and partners to examine migration to the cloud from a technical and business perspective, including return on investment.

For us, moving is going to be hard. We've got lots of integrations and custom plugins and we regularly do things directly in the database where the same is either not possible or not performant using the REST api or other methods. All of this needs to be redesigned and reimplemented, which is going to take a lot of time and effort. On the plus side, everything we're doing today is possible on the cloud.. just different. We'll need to re-implement many things as we shift reporting to their data lake, plugins towards Forge, and other automations towards Rovo.

Some things are easier on the cloud platform, while others are a bit more difficult. Not having to manage the infrastructure, application upgrades, disaster recovery, etc. are clearly a plus. On the other hand, management of plugin-specific data is currently more complex. Also, simple things like identity management of external users and even backups to guard against accidental deletion/modification of data is a bit more challenging.

At the end of the day, I think a move to Atlassian's cloud platform is inevitable. I don't think Atlassian will kill support for their data center instances, but they have a long history of letting products stagnate when they have another option that's preferred. To use an analogy: you're driving a nice, older car that's paid for and works well, but is showing it's age a bit. Now here comes Atlassian with a shiny new car that's better in almost every way than your old one, but ooof... the price tag (for us, our annual cost would be about 4x higher on the cloud, plus the cost to move). We faced a similar decision point when moving from single-server perpetual licenses to the annual data center licenses that were literally 10x the cost. There, we kept using single server licenses until we no longer could (for us, this came before the discontinuation of single server licenses).

The higher cost is not without benefit though: There are a large number of features and integrations that are cloud-only and that number is growing all the time. Also, the AI and other improvements on the cloud are expected to improve efficiency and productivity. When you have a large number of users, these gains can produce a good return on investment in spite of the larger expense. Our next steps are to conduct a proof of concept with a few teams to test the improvements and potential benefits while we also work on migration of reporting, integrations, and customizations. If the user experience isn't significantly better, we may defer the migration or even look at alternatives. I honestly don't expect that to happen though... In my view, it's not a question of whether to move to Atlassian's cloud, it's a question of when.

Note: my comments here are largely focused on Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Confluence. We have other Atlassian applications as well, but they are either not available on the cloud or have strong competitors in the market.

[John Dunkelberg]

We're in a very similar place.

I'm glad you mentioned looking at alternative competitive solutions.  For people facing a steep migration cost, it indeed may be a very good time to spend time re-assessing the marketplace.  That certainly has been part of my thought process for us.

[John Dunkelberg]

We're on DC and evaluating migration to Cloud.  As others have noted, Atlassian has been clear that they are Cloud-first for some time now.  From other comments I'd add that folks may not realize that it appears Atlassian has two quite separate codebases here, so it's nontrivial to port features over from Cloud to DC.  I recall going to one of the annual user events circa 2017 or so (I don't remember if it was called "Teams" back then) and in talking to the people at the separate Jira Cloud and (then) Jira Server booths it was really clear they were two separate teams working in two separate codebases.

That said, I am disappointed that Jira Cloud doesn't seem to have tackled some of the Enterprise scaling design issues in their fork of the code.  One that's a particular pain for us is that Versions are at the Project level, so we're seeing that Plans which span projects have poor performance pulling these together.  i.e. if you have ten projects in a Plan each of which have monthly Versions "Jan2025" thru "Dec2025" those are treated as 120 versions in the Plan, not 12.

@Namita Awasthi we also have in-house extensions for Jira to integrate with our internal applications.  We've been closely engaged with Atlassian in seeking solutions to gaps in capability in the Cloud APIs, and have made a lot of progress, but it's certainly going to be a substantial investment to port these applications.

On the third-party vendors, I think the major vendors (for us: Tempo, Adaptavist, EazyBI) are pretty much good on Cloud and starting to surpass DC, but there are still gaps fundamental to the change in platform.

[Dave Thomas]

Good point that the code bases are completely different now.  When they first split, I think cloud and data center were the same, but the entire back end is completely different at this point.   When people are (understandably) frustrated about features on the cloud not being available on DC, they may not realize it's not a task of porting the cloud code and just tweaking a few things... it's a task of re-implementing those same features on a different product.  In some cases, it's not feasible or even possible.

@John Dunkelberg - Have you guys looked at Align?  In my opinion, Jira Portfolio (now called Advanced Roadmaps and included with DC) has always been pretty terrible.  AgileCraft created a much better product, which Atlassian purchased and re-branded as Align.   It's more expensive (of course!).

[John Dunkelberg]

@Dave Thomas we'd looked at it years ago and saw it was designed to be more strictly SAFE than we operate.  Looking at it now it looks like they're advertising more flexibility there.  I just looked at the Pricing tab and that might be the killer, if indeed the only way to buy it is as part of the "Strategy Collection" and that needs to be priced against our userbase.  Even if I price it with the idea that only lead roles would have licenses that's a big pricetag.   But nonetheless good to perhaps put on the backlog to dig into more.