Our Journey to High Availability with Jira - Part II

[#1]

Previously...

Last time we left at the crossroads of trying to decide between Jira Cloud vs Jira Data Center.

As we had already done significant investigation, (a proof of concept and user testing for Jira Data Center) we needed to shift gears and perform an initial investigation into the effort involved in moving to Jira Cloud. Was it worth the effort to scrap our current migration strategy and start over from scratch, or had we gone too far down the path with Data Center to give up on that now?

Is Cloud the best option for us?

After doing some research, comparing costs, looking at the pros and cons, and getting an idea of the difficulty/effort involved in performing a Cloud Migration vs a Data Center migration, we concluded that Cloud seemed like the better choice for us.

As I had mentioned in my previous article this was also the same conclusion/recommendation that I received from the Atlassian experts at the 2019 Summit, so we felt confident about this plan.

Oh No! Not another roadblock!

I took this to our decision makers, and we didn't get very far into presenting our findings before concerns were raised about data residency.  The company I work for is a Canadian SaaS company and we needed to be sure that our policies would allow us to have our Jira data hosted outside of Canada.  Apart from those concerns, everyone we presented to still agreed that Cloud looked like the better option if the data residency concerns could be resolved.  It took several weeks for our governance team to evaluate any customer impact of Jira data residing outside of Canada.  With this uncertainty, doubt began to set in about our future in the Cloud.

However, just when we were on the verge of giving up hope, we received the green light from our governance team to plan our move to Jira Cloud!

We're moving to the Cloud! How do we get there?

We have our decision!  Now we just needed to figure out how we’re going to get there. 

My first task was to find information gathering.  I found several great resources on the Atlassian Community, articles others had written, Official documentation from Atlassian, as well as questions others had asked with helpful accepted answers.  We know that we have a very large project ahead of us, but we have started leveraging a Trello board to break this large project down into smaller, more manageable tasks.  When you look at the project from this view it doesn't feel quite so large anymore.

A sample of some of the items that we know we are going to have to tackle:

• Our BitBucket Server and our Bamboo Server are using our Jira Server as a Crowd User directory for Authentication. We are going to need to change the User Directory to use our AD server directly for both servers.  Luckily this task can be completed before we even start with the migration itself.
• We know that there are a few plugins that we use today that aren't on Jira Cloud. We will need to see if we can find alternatives or decide if we can live without those going forward.
• We have Application Links to our BitBucket/Bamboo servers and external links with other applications like Zendesk. We will need to make sure that all those links continue to work after we have successfully migrated to Jira Cloud.
• And of course, we need to be able to successfully migrate our Jira Server data into Jira Cloud.

Stay tuned until next time!

Obviously, we aren't finished.  I plan to write a final installment of this series where I will talk about how our production migration process went, and what things we learned during the migration, both in testing and production.  I will also comment on what things we found extremely helpful in making this successful, as well as what things we wish we had more information about, or were aware of earlier in the migration process if any issue came up.

[Maren]

@Jimmy Seddon Thanks for sharing an update! Looking forward to seeing your final installment and learning from your journey how we can continue to improve the migration experience.

[Joff]

Love the progress updates. We are excited to have you on cloud :) 

[Jimmy Seddon]

Thanks @Joff it was quite the task to get here, but our company has been very pleased with Jira Cloud so it was definitely worth the effort!