Is that still worth building addon for Jira/Confluence server hosting?

Michael Yang - Shinetech Software

On Feb 2, 2024 the support will be no longer be available for server licenses, but it will still  avaiable for data center. For addons the codes are basically same for server and data center versions, Is it still worth building server version for a new addon as a Marketplace Partner? I have no idea but would like hear and discuss different thoughts on this.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

It is.

Data Center is not going away any time soon.

DC is widely used and has huge user numbers, so it's going to remain a very large marketplace. 

But it is going to be a more discriminating one - the places using DC are going to have policies in place for cost-benefit analysis  - think  "Is this app really worth it for our 100k users"?   So if you're going to write something new, it really does need to fill a gap for large user bases.

As someone being involved in a lot of Server to Cloud or DC migrations, I'm seeing an increasing number of server-only apps drop die out in the marketplace.  People going to Cloud need something totally different, and people moving to DC are questioning if they actually need the app, with the answer being "no" in a lot of cases.

BTW, Server and DC apps are not the same.  They can be, but there are extra things you have to think about and then code for when writing a DC app.  Many apps don't need to worry about sessions and indexing and and and, so what works for server works on DC for them, but a lot DC apps do need to think about it.

DC apps are downwards compatible though - if you write your app for DC, it's going to work fine on server (which you can now think of as "a single node DC install"), but a surprising number of Server apps on the marketplace do not work properly on DC.