What are application tunnels?
10 min
Advanced
By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:
- Define Application tunnels
- Understand how application tunnels work
- List the steps required to set up application tunnels
What is an application tunnel?
An application tunnel is a secure connection between Atlassian cloud products and a server or data center on-premise environment living in a private network. It allows secure communication and data exchange without exposing your network to the internet.
Application tunnels avoid making your network public and restrict incoming connections to your network. Setting up an application tunnel between Atlassian Cloud and self-managed products can be useful in a few situations.
👉 For example: When a long migration process happens, products are migrated in phases, one by one. Therefore, some of the work on Atlassian Cloud might depend on work that’s still in the on-premise product.
👉 Another example: If a company has a new acquisition, they might need to join work from two environments.
How does an application tunnel work?
Configuring the application tunnel involves setting up a tunnel server on cloud and a tunnel client in the on-premise environment. The tunnel server and tunnel client connect and any incoming connections to the on-premise environment will use the tunnel.
👇 Click the boxes below to explore the different components of application tunnels.
👇This is how tunnel servers, tunnel clients and application links interact.
Although you can link multiple cloud products from one organization to one application tunnel, you can’t connect an on-premise application to more than one tunnel. So, when working with multiple organizations, keep in mind that you can only connect one organization to one on-premise application.
However, it is possible to set up multiple tunnels from one organization to multiple self-managed instances.
How to set up an application tunnel?
To create an application tunnel between a cloud organization and a data center instance:
- Install the Application tunnels app from the Atlassian Marketplace in your self-managed instance.
- Configure the required outgoing connections and upstream ports in your self-managed environment.
- Create a tunnel for each on-premise instance that you want to connect from admin.atlassian.com. This involves providing the URL/IP address of the self managed instance as well as generating a security key associated to the tunnel.
- Link your Cloud products to the tunnel you created by adding the generated security key to your self hosted instance.
Which products support application tunnels?
You can set up application tunnels between cloud products and data center instances.
👇Click the tabs below to explore what cloud and data center support.
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