Best recommended approach to install Jira on AWS

[ashleyg]

We are looking to set up enterprise Jira for our organisation on AWS and looking for the best recommended approach for that. We would like to start with 1000 licenses and then might scale up or down as needed. We went through the AWS quick start approach and also the docker image container way of implementing it (the docker images are not officially supported by Atlassian). 

We are trying to explore few options here. Is there an Atlassian provided Jira based AMI that we could use for the EC2s? 

Also for the quick start approach we are basically looking at how to implement the Atlassian provided cloud formation templates as part of terraform templates since we use terraform in our organisation for any stack deployment in AWS.

Kindly help recommend the best solution here based on the above information.

Cheers,

Ashley

[Andy Heinzer]

The answer depends largely on what kind of deployment option you want:  Jira Server versus Jira Data Center.    The reason I think most Jira admins like AWS is the ability to quickly spin up another Jira node using that cloud formation template.  This is really only applicable to using the Data Center version of Jira that has multiple nodes to handle scaling or uptime concerns.

If you're only planning to use a Jira Server license (not data center), then you can still install Jira to an AWS platform, but you can't use that cloud formation template to do it.  You would have to do it from scratch.  If that is the case, I would recommend the generic guide of Installing Jira on Linux.

However if you know you want to use data center, I would recommend using the Getting started with Jira Data Center on AWS documentation.

To answer you question, Atlassian does not provide images of Jira installations at this time, either in AMIs, docker deployments, etc.  Jira has an awful lot of deployment choices an admin can use when installing, such as database type/version, OS, etc.  Creating an official image would be rather complicated to support for all environments, but perhaps someday there will be an official image.  In the meantime, the suggestion solution is to either deploy manually for Server, or use the cloud formation templates for data center installations.