Cloud Transition Quarterly Community Round-Up - Q4 2024

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Hi Atlassian Community!

I'm Casey from the Cloud Transition team. Welcome to the Cloud Transition Quarterly Round-Up!

Curious about the Cloud Transition Team?

We focus on providing smart insights and scalable tools to help you confidently optimize your cloud journey. Whether you are moving to cloud or growing your footprint, we focus on delivering a path to success that meets your organization's needs.

As we wrap up the year, we’re excited to share the second edition of our Cloud Transition Quarterly Round-Up with you. These round-ups are designed to provide you with updates on the migration and cloud tooling capabilities that have been released this quarter, as well as insights into what we are preparing to launch in the upcoming months.

Let’s dive in!

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What’s shipped this quarter?

Get to cloud faster without compromising reliability or security 🚀

Ensure future-ready migrations with our enhanced platform

We transitioned to our next-generation migration platform, which is specifically designed to efficiently manage complex migrations at scale. This platform offers enhanced visibility and improved troubleshooting capabilities. A key feature of this new platform is the support for Project-by-Project (PbP) migrations, allowing for phased migrations and migrations from multiple sites, which supports complex migrations.

Implementing the new migration platform required breaking changes which have impacted some of our older Jira Cloud Migration Assistant (JCMA) versions. Therefore, customers planning to migrate on or after May 6, 2025, must update their JCMA to version 1.12.5 or newer. Read our blog to learn more about this update, how it may impact your migrations, and to view our recommended actions.

Experience a 360° view of your Atlassian footprint with Portfolio Insights

Earlier this month, we launched our early access program (EAP) for Portfolio Insights, a new feature within Atlassian Administration that provides:

• A centralized view of your Atlassian tooling landscape across Data Center and Cloud environments.
• The capabilities to analyze and compare your data against Atlassian guardrails and best practices to better understand the cloud readiness of your Jira Data Center instances.

By centralizing this critical information admins and migration planners can significantly reduce the time and effort required for portfolio assessment as part of their migration planning.

Access our open-source tool for ID mapping

Cloud Transition Tools (CTT) is a deployable application designed to help you resolve integration issues that arise after migrating to cloud. This is particularly relevant for Jira entities like Projects, Issues, Boards, Filters, and Custom Fields, which may have their integer IDs changed during migration from self-managed environments to cloud, potentially disrupting integrations that rely on these IDs. By providing APIs for ID mapping and translation, CTT ensures that your external integrations remain functional post-migration. This open-source tool can be integrated directly with your applications or accessed via REST APIs to address ID mismatches efficiently.

Access a new migration path for P2 to Forge migrations

We have introduced a new migration pathway that allows marketplace app developers to seamlessly migrate Server and Data Center app data to Forge. This transition enhances the security, reliability, and scalability of your apps. The new pathway retains many elements from the well-tested and widely used Connect migration process, while also integrating aspects of Forge's design and functionality. For more details, refer to our developer guide.

Take advantage of early access programs to quickly migrate your Xray and Zephyr Squad app data to cloud 🖇️

Faster migrations for two top apps

We know speed and reliability are key when migrating your critical apps. That’s why we’re enhancing the architecture behind app migrations to improve performance, scalability, and reliability for cloud transitions.

If you're migrating your Xray or Zephyr Squad app data to cloud now through February 2025, reach out to our Engineering Manager, Leon Messerschmidt (lmesserschmidt@atlassian.com), to join our beta and take advantage of these improvements as we’re building them.

Pre-load your app data to cloud

You can begin to experience faster app migrations now with our app data pre-load feature available now for Xray and Zephyr Squad on JCMA versions 1.12.16 and newer. By pre-loading immutable data, such as attachments, before the actual migration day, the time required for the production migration is significantly reduced. This is especially beneficial when migrating large volumes of data, as it allows for the transfer of data over several days rather than all at once on the migration day.

App audit log data post-load

Atlassian has partnered with SmartBear, developer of the Zephyr family of apps in our Atlassian marketplace, to surface when a cloud instance is ready for use after a migration, even while low priority entities (like audit logs) are sill being sent in the background.
To take advantage of this feature, ensure you’re using JCMA version 1.12.15 or newer. We are working to onboard more apps to reduce even further the migration downtime.

Streamline your cloud-to-cloud migrations with new capabilities ☁️

Support for copying cross-project boards and filters AND copying advanced roadmaps between cloud sites

Based on feedback from customers and solution partners, we've begun addressing major pain points related to copying global and cross-project entities. The previous lack of support during cloud-to-cloud migration has hindered our admins' ability to respond swiftly to organizational changes. Supporting these entities ensures smooth and efficient data movement across cloud sites, crucial for enterprise customers who depend on cross-project boards and filters for summary views, leadership reporting, and multi-project team support. This support will reduce manual efforts and help us deliver a more seamless experience.

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What’s coming in the next quarter?

Data Center health insights for Jira Software

We’re expanding the functionality of the Portfolio Insights EAP. In addition to product discovery across Cloud and Data Center environments, participants will get access to health insights for Jira Software Data Center instances. New features include health score analysis, performance metrics to help you optimize your setup, and much more!

Prepare your instance data ahead of your migration

The ability to process and store pre-migration check results in advance in JCMA will be widely available in the upcoming quarter. These checks ensure your data can transition to cloud seamlessly and alert you to any necessary actions before migration (ex: installing cloud products in your destination site). By understanding these requirements in advance of your migration, you can make informed decisions that streamline your move to cloud and reduce your overall migration time.

A direct migration pathway from Zephyr Squad to Zephyr Scale

Currently, migrating from Zephyr Squad (Data Center) to Zephyr Scale (Cloud) necessitates a multi-step process. To streamline this procedure and minimize migration time, we will introduce a new, direct migration path. This enhancement will facilitate a more efficient transfer of app data between environments, reducing disruptions to your workflows.

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That’s a wrap!🎉

Thanks for reading our round-up, and keep an eye out for next quarter’s digest!

We’d love to hear your thoughts, questions, or experiences with any of these features as comments below. Your feedback helps us improve and better support your transition to cloud.

Best,
Casey Chatman

Product Marketing Manager, Cloud Transitions