End of server sale & support – December 2022 update

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1 August 2023: Thanks for your interest in how work is progressing on Atlassian Cloud Migration. There's a new End of server sale & support – July 2023 update now available, so this older article may no longer be actively monitored.

Hello Community,

My name is Dhiren Pardhanani and I’ve recently joined Atlassian as Head of Cloud Shift.

Since announcing the Server end-of-support in October 2020, @Partha has been sharing regular updates each quarter to help the Atlassian Community follow the journey to cloud. We’ve been hard at work again this quarter, listening to customer feedback, finding opportunities to better support you and making improvements to our Cloud offerings and migration capabilities.

Moving forward, I’ll continue sharing these regular updates to help you stay across what we’re hearing and how we’re focusing our efforts to support your journey to the cloud.

Security, data management and compliance

”There need to be better controls on user management and security. Ability to disable the ability for existing users to invite others. Improvement of security integrations such as that for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps.”

Security and compliance continue to be a top priority for all our teams. In the last 3 months, we’ve made great progress on our commitments and are delivering some features early and have several more launching in Q1 2023.

Last month, we launched Data Residency in Germany, ahead of schedule. We're pleased to expand our data residency capabilities into a fourth region alongside the US, EU, and Australia; to ensure you have the controls you need to be successful in cloud.

Along with increasing the number of supported data residency regions, we also expanded audit log coverage to include Bitbucket activity and Jira Software/Confluence permission changes.

We understand secure collaboration is important, not just for company employees, but also for extended staff such as contractors and vendors. We’ve made progress and have rolled out an early access program for external user security and expect to have it generally available in Q1 2023.

Last but not least, we also launched HIPAA for Jira Service Management Cloud Enterprise. Teams can now store and manage their personal health information in three Atlassian Cloud products; Jira Software, Confluence and Jira Service Management. We plan to expand the availability of HIPAA to smaller teams in 2023 after listening to customer feedback.

We’ll continue to work on supporting more data residency and security capabilities and share updates as they’re available. You can follow our progress on key cloud roadmap items including:

• Data residency for the UK, Japan and Canada is delayed until the second half of 2023. As we unlock each new region, we learn more about the capacity required to sustain new regions and have decided to prioritize the reliability of our infrastructure before unblocking additional regions.

• Data residency for apps has been delayed to avoid negatively impacting some of our customers without a good path for improvement.

• FedRAMP timing is currently being re-evaluated and we hope to share new estimates for delivery in early 2023. Learn more in Update: Atlassian’s path to FedRAMP

• BYOK encryption early access program is on pace to start in early 2023. For folks that are interested in participating, please comment below or contact us.

I’d also like to take the opportunity to share this overview of the company’s expanded commitment and approach to accessibility which covers our plans for engaging with the disability community, improving our platforms and design system, and accelerating improvements in accessibility across Atlassian products.

Apps and integrations

”Some add ons and customization may not be available – still analyzing the impact to our org.”

The wait is over… Behaviours – ScriptRunner for Jira Cloud; a customer-favorite feature, is now available on cloud. This app complements ScriptRunner for Jira and boosts your Jira field customization power by defining how fields should behave based on project or issue types when creating a new Jira issue for better control and user experience.

For those of you looking for more cloud apps to extend the value of your Atlassian products, the range available on Atlassian Marketplace is continuing to grow every day. Head to the Atlassian Marketplace to browse more of the cloud apps that have recently been added or check out our latest New Cloud Apps Roundup for an update on some of the 260 apps added since our last Cloud Apps roundup.

Some of the latest additions include Project milestones for Jira, Email&Tasks: Jira Cloud for Gmail, Recommendations for Confluence, Slack integration for Confluence; plus many more.

To learn more about how to begin assessing your apps in preparation for a move to cloud, visit the new app assessment page offered as part of the Atlassian Migration Program.

Scale and performance

”It's early days yet, but so far big improvements in (1) Performance (2) Fewer clicks for some key functionality like editing issues.”

In Partha’s last update, we announced general availability for 35,000 users on a single instance of Jira Software Cloud and Confluence Cloud and shared our continued commitment to meeting enterprise needs at scale and ensuring that scale and speed go hand-in-hand.

As we head into the new year, we have more exciting scale improvements coming. In the first half of 2023, we’ll be increasing the number of users we support on a single instance of Confluence from 35,000 to 50,000 and increasing the number of agents on Jira Service Management from 5,000 to 10,000.

Meeting the scale and performance expectations of our customers have remains among our top priorities. We’ll continue to provide you with regular updates through Community and on the Cloud Roadmap as work progresses.

Set up, configuration and administration

”With our local user and group lists cleaned up, our migration to SSO/SAML was very easy for the Cloud instance we were migrating to.”

We believe the Atlassian administration (admin.atlassian.com) experience will be the centralized, mission control center for our products, allowing admins to operate with visibility, control, and flexibility. We continue to invest in making the administration of Atlassian Cloud products better and are continuing to centralize user management across all our products.

One major accomplishment in centralized user management was the release of our multiple identity providers support. Customers can connect multiple identity providers to consolidate user management of any acquired companies' identity provider within the parent company and gives customers the option to maintain separate identity providers for separate departments' domains within a company. Admins can now also set the default authentication policy as a non-billable policy when not synced with an identity provider.

In addition, to centrally manage the access and security of products, customers can utilize Atlassian Access to enforce SAML SSO and to sync users and groups via SCIM user provisioning to provide access to Atlassian Cloud products, such as Jira Software and Confluence. As I previously mentioned, we are expanding SAML SSO support for Jira Service Management portal-only customer accounts and SCIM support to automate group user provisioning with Trello.

In the past few months, we’ve launched new capabilities for Cloud admins, such as org-delete and user counts. Org-delete empowers Atlassian admins to self-serve delete an organization without the need to rely on Atlassian Support.

User counts is a newly released insight feature providing admins with real-time visibility into the total number of users who have access to at least one product under an Enterprise plan, or have been invited to at least one product under the Enterprise plan, but haven’t accepted yet.

On capabilities I’ve mentioned in my last update, I want to call out the developments that are released and remain in progress that will make the process of migrating easier for admins.

We have recently opened an Early Access Program to support customers who need to flatten nested groups between AzureAD and Atlassian Access to assist in their cloud migrations. You will also soon be able to claim a subset of users with selective user claim. Lastly, admins will also soon be able to view detailed release notes and subscribe to email updates for changes rolling out to your organization’s cloud products via admin.atlassian.com. You can follow this and other enhancements we’re delivering for Administration on our Cloud Roadmap.

Pricing and packaging

”We need to do a cost analysis for what it would take to migrate to the cloud. Differences between Data Center and the cloud version plus years and years of customizations make the move seem potentially costly.”

As more customers unlock a modernized experience for their users on cloud, we’re hearing more about how they’ve been able to elevate the value of IT teams while starting to see revenue gains from better collaboration and increased productivity. Hear from Atlassian’s customers on their Cloud migration success stories.

Depending on your team’s size and complexity, migrations take 9 months on average from assessment to launch. Starting your journey today gets you one step closer to the best (and last) upgrade you’ll ever need.

We know that migrating is a big investment, so to help you communicate the value of cloud to your stakeholders and leadership, this new resource helps assess the costs and benefits of migrating. Additionally, we recommend exploring eligibility for step-up credits to avoid losing the value of your unused server maintenance or a cloud migration trial to explore cloud features and start a proof of concept.

And for the additional complexity enterprise organizations face, save on costs and avoid double paying with dual licensing and loyalty discounts. Loyalty discounts will be available until 30 June, so lock in a 20% discount in the next few months remaining before they end.

The process of migrating

”Better integration between products. Migration went fairly smoothly. Migration also brought with it an upgrade from older versions of Jira Software & Confluence, so we gained access to some new features (also indirectly; since I took part in facilitating the migration, I have learned a lot more about the products we used).”

All of this means nothing without being able to execute a successful migration to the cloud. We’ve migrated countless customers over the last couple of years and those experiences have helped us make massive improvements to the process and the tooling so that we can make migrations even easier and simpler.

Gathering feedback from customers who have completed migrations, surfaced opportunities to simplify user migrations and improve our migration tooling. We’ll continue to improve these in the coming quarters, creating more straightforward and effective user experiences to offer significant improvements in product resilience, performance, and speed. And making it easier to succeed on your planned migration date by further optimizing efficiency with advanced capabilities like pre-migrating users and attachments.

We’ve also invested in supercharging your assessment experience. Our sales and migration support teams have introduced a new assessment process to help you validate how cloud meets all your needs and to help you understand the migration process and what’s involved. This new process will make your migration smoother, easier, and faster.

Wondering where to start? As we approach the 1-year mark for server end-of-support, we recommend starting a cloud migration trial, if you haven’t already. Cloud migration trials are free extended trials of cloud where you can explore the latest cloud-only features to see the value of cloud firsthand. When you start your trial, you’ll receive guidance through the Atlassian Migration Program on how to successfully migrate to the cloud with the time you have left.

I’ll close out my first update with another reminder that Atlassian Analytics and the Atlassian Data Lake are currently available in Open Beta for Cloud Enterprise customers of Jira Software or Jira Service Management and will be generally available for Cloud Enterprise customers in the coming months.

There’s also still time to join the beta for the ability to rename Epics in Jira Software Cloud and test the changes, prepare training materials for your teams and provide feedback ahead of the full feature release later in 2023. Join the private Epic-Renaming Beta Community Group for more details on the beta and to enable it for your test instance.

Thank you again to all of you who continue to share your feedback and help us shape our approach to delivering deliver a world-class cloud experience. I look forward to sharing more of these updates in the future. Along with our Cloud Roadmap and Data Center Roadmap, they continue to be the best place to follow our progress. You can also ‘Watch’ this article to be notified when we share our next update in the new year.

[Christian Schneider]

Dear Dhiren,

thank you very much for your update. I am pleased to see some new features coming up the road very soon, e.g. German data residency - one step closer to Switzerland. :-)

One thing so:

We’ve migrated countless customers over the last couple of years and those experiences have helped us make massive improvements to the process and the tooling so that we can make migrations even easier and simpler.

This is a joke, right? I am currently migrating from Server to Cloud. My focus is on Assets right now. I have spent more than 6 weeks and more then USD 15'000.- into this and I have hit 16 (!) bugs and feature requests, which prevent a smooth transition from Server to Cloud. It might be a good idea to stop developing new features at all and focus on fixing bugs in the existing products. 

Chris

[Dave Mathijs]

I agree with @Christian Schneider: Assets migration bugs + feature parity and data residency for apps are blocking issues for Cloud migrations.

[Andrew Laden]

The only thing I am looking for Atlassian to provide is better clarity on what is happening with DataCenter editions. For some users Cloud will NEVER be an option despite whatever "customer stories" or "sales enticements" Atlassian can present. We have integrations or other customizations that do not work in the cloud. We want to better control our own upgrade cycle. We don't want new "Features" like the new issue view forced on us. We don't want some billing screw up at atlassian to take our instance offline. Or some technical issue to take us offline with no recourse for fast recovery

We want to know that Datacenter is not a dead product line. That it will be supported, and new features added in parity with Cloud edition. It would also help if there was a lower price point tier for DataCenter so that new users could have an option of looking at a on-prem (*or maybe we should just call it "self-managed" since you can run datacenter edition in a cloud instance) solution

We just renewed our Server Support for as long as possible, all the way out to Feb '24. in the "hope" that Atlassian will be reasonable in creating a better price tier for on prem less then 500, so we don't have to more then double our costs. or at least to defer that price hike as long as possible. 

Really Atlassian, show a little love to the original on-prem users who made you what you are. 

[Robert Levandowski]

Over the last decade or so, I've championed the use of Atlassian products at my organization and others. I did that despite Atlassian's less-than-stellar history of IT security, because I saw the value in Confluence and JIRA—because I could run instances at home that were fully licensed, on-premise, secured to my network, and fully functional.

In 2023, I'll be looking for alternatives from other companies for my personal needs—and I've already stopped recommending Atlassian products for most purposes. The value proposition just isn't there.

Both products are used to store inherently sensitive data. I'm not confident that cloud-based Atlassian won't be the next LastPass. 

At $10 per year per product, I could afford to keep my home environment current and explore new capabilities, and then advocate for much more lucrative deployments from deep corporate pockets. Atlassian got $20/year it wasn't otherwise going to get, for virtually no incremental cost.

To get the same capabilities on cloud, I'd have to pay $1,500 a year... or to maintain my on-prem server, over $15,000 for the cheapest DataCenter license. The value just isn't there. I don't get this pricing decision; you'll lose the $20/year from folks like me, and you'll lose inestimable goodwill that translated into much bigger purchase orders.

How many Starter Edition users do you think you have who are purchase influencers at Fortune 500 companies? Offering those folks a reasonably-priced Starter Edition of DataCenter—at the impulse-buy level for practical home-and-family use—is the cheapest advertising for massive site licenses you could ever buy. Perhaps you might even consider a loyalty discount on top of that...

[Gosia Kowalska]

Hello @Andrew Laden, thank you very much for your comment and I’m sorry for the slower-than-usual response. My name is Gosia Kowalska and I am Head of Product for Data Center products.

We are aware that Data Center is still mission-critical for many of our customers and by no means is Data Center a “dead product line.” We are committed to continuing to support you on your journey with Atlassian whether you are currently in the process of a cloud migration or choose to remain self-managed for the foreseeable future.

In 2022 alone we have shipped over 200 new releases of Data Center products including platform/major releases across the board: Jira Software 9.0, Jira Service Management 5.0, Confluence 8.0, Bitbucket 8.0, Bamboo 9.0 and Crowd 5.0. Across these releases, we shipped an array of powerful new features including Automation for Jira, Guardrails and Safeguards, Application Monitoring, Secret Scanning, OAuth 2.0 and more. Additionally, we furthered our security uplift program, heavily invested in quality and focused on compliance demands with large advancements in our Accessibility work.

As you might be aware, last year we shared that we were shifting the vision of our Data Center offering to focus on what our customers shared were their most critical needs:

• Performance and Scale

• Security and Compliance

• Infrastructure and Operations

Since then we have continued to listen to customer feedback, and are now expanding our future direction of Data Center to better meet these requests. While we will continue supporting and investing in our original three focus areas, we are broadening our investment to include:

• A further investment in security, specifically focused on enhancing security practices and up-leveling security posture

• New experience improvements for both admin and end users (here you will notice new features and capabilities in Data Center, drawing closer to cloud parity)

I would like to note that while we will invest in product and experience improvements for Data Center, there will never be exact feature parity between Cloud and Data Center. However, I would like to share some examples of recently shipped and upcoming features that bring Data Center closer to Cloud parity:

• Login-free customer portal for Jira Service Management

• Automation for Jira

• Emoji experience for Confluence

• Comment in edit mode for Confluence

Make sure to review our public roadmap for a comprehensive list of recently shipped and upcoming feature releases. We’d love to hear from you about additional product enhancements that you would like to see in Data Center. Feel free to share in a comment or send me an email at mkowalska@atlassian.com.

Last but not least, I would encourage you to join the Data Center Community Group. Here, you can stay up to date concerning all things Data Center as we regularly post updates about important releases, our plans, and best practices.

I hope this is helpful. Thank you for your time.

-Gosia

[Andrew Laden]

Hello @Gosia Kowalska Thank you very much for responding.

I am glad to hear that you are going to be expanding the roadmap for DataCenter editions to add new visible features and not just back end security and performance fixes. I don't use cloud at all, so while I recall seeing some features that were released in cloud that would be nice to have in on-prem, I'd have to go back over the release notes to see what they were. I got tired of asking "will this be on server" every time some new cloud announcement came out, so I stopped keeping track. But as I start seeing them again, I'll start asking again and tagging you in the comments. :)  A few that come to mind would be linking multiple confluence spaces to a single JSM knowledge base, and fixing the issues around unlicensed but non-anonymous access to confluence. Also take a look at any of the highly voted bugs and feature requests from your own jira site, some of which have been open over 10 years as "gathering interest"

Of the 4 new features you mentioned, Automation for Jira has been around for a while, so this isn't really a new "feature". You just bought the product from the original developer and bundled it in, like you did Insight. So it's a bit of a stretch to take credit for that. We use an SSO plugin, so we have had login free jira for a while as well. Emojis, while cute, aren't exactly a major feature. So the commenting is the only one of those that even interests me. Also, according to the roadmap Those last 2 features aren't even released yet.

Actually, seeing what has been happening in cloud recently, specifically the sudden dropping of the original issue view and forcing everyone to the new issue view, I am glad that not everything from cloud is making it to on-prem. I think there would be a total revolt if you forced the new issue view into the on-prem jira.

None of this addresses the concern about the need for lower tier price point. At this point, managing and  using the Atlassian products in cloud is a very different experience from using them on prem. I understand that Atlassian wants to be "cloud-first" But there is a big difference between "Cloud-First" and "Cloud-Only". Due to the lack of an entry level price point for the on-prem suite, all new customers are being forced to go to cloud. and should they later on desire to change to on-prem, most of what they have learned in cloud will not be relevant. Not to mention the lack of tools for cloud to on-prem migrations (as compared to on-prem to cloud)

This is what is most concerning when I talk about on-prem being a "dead" product line. While Atlassian will continue to treat it as a "cash cow" for their existing userbase who can afford it, they are putting no effort into expanding that user base, and in fact doing all they can to reduce it. While there are promises to support it, it is really just a case of waiting for the number of users on it to start to dwindle down (either via cloud migration, or just switching to another product due to the extravagant cost) to the point where they feel that they can get rid of it. 

For me to really believe that it is not a dead product line, I would want to see some effort by Atlassian to bring new customers onboard. (either brand new, or cloud to on-prem migrations) Key to this would be an entry level price point/license tier.  How many new on-prem customers has Atlassian added in the past year? If the userbase isn't growing, then the product line is stagnating.

Looking forward to your response.

Andrew

[Gerald Hochegger]

Hello,

reading this thread makes me sad. As @Andrew Laden summarized the on-prem product line  looks dead. There is no visible engagement from Atlassian to keep on-prem alive and vibrant - on the contrary - they do their best to dwindle down the existing customer base and force new users to the Cloud by an absurd pricing policy and a 500 minimum user limit.

• pricing - we (as academic institution) paid abut 10k/year for an an unlimited user confluence - that was a fair deal! and allowed us to move many processes to confluence. Now we should pay 135k/year (datacenter 20k users) or a whooping >250k (cloud 20k users) ???
  Who at Atlassian thinks their customers can afford a >10x price increase without major problems ???
• 500 user limit - way to big for smaller projects - especially for Jira Software - my (Atlassian) way or the highway - move to Cloud or leave (yes we will leave in favour of gitlab)
  (funny fact: products with more competition in the market - JSM - do not have a 500 user/agent minimum restriction)

So for Atlassian to walk the talk and show visible engagement for on-prem, improvements on at least this two points are inevitable.

The only positive effect of this whole disaster is the hope of emerging alternatives in the light of this uncompromising treatment of existing customers. Or maybe the Atlassian stock price erodes even more and forces the Atlassian management to come to their senses.

Greetings,
Gerald

[ITMAGE]

We are running 25 user Confluence and Jira instances with active maintenance and about a dozen apps to extend functionality. Paying between 3k and 5k per year is sustainable and reasonable for us and we're happy to give that money to Atlassian, but a move to Datacenter with it's 500 user minimum and recurring subscription model is just waaaaaayyyy out of the ballpark. It's unfortunate because we have introduced several new client to Confluence and Jira over the years but none of them (well,, maybe one might but it's highly unlikely) want to to continue at Datacenter prices and lose their perpetual license. Will some of them choose to move to the cloud? Perhaps, but our focus and business model is with on-prem systems and the clients we have want to retain their on-prem infrastructure for a plethora reasons not the least of which is pricing, reliability and expectations. With on-prem we all know what we have, we have clear knowledge of the costs and resources, the ups and downs, have great flexibility and to be blunt, it's the devil we know, right people?... As some have articulated here, there are folks who will never migrate to the cloud for whatever reason, and to remove the choice,,,, well there just no words. Anyway those who don't transition to the cloud will either seek new solutions, roll their own, or stay with the final update of Conf and Jira for as long as it's sustainable and practicable. If Atlassian decides to offer an on-prem user tier of datacenter that is both a perpetual license and at a reasonable cost, then we would probably continue maintenance and so on. And what's the logic behind abandoning app sales for SERVER clients? Why? If app sales will continue for Datacenter, then why not for SERVER? Seems like a great way to agitate people and is mighty peculiar to me.

[Biju Vennickle Arumugam]

We are using Atlassian tool (self hosted) with 100 users, and would like to migrate to cloud(Atlassian data center ).

I have raised support tickets (PA-149641 , PA-148220), but we don't see any response from the Sales or support team.

Looks like Atlassian is not equipped to handle their strategy for migrating the users to their cloud yet.

[Rodney Hughes]

End of SERVER support is sad .. but our organisation will NOT consider moving to CLOUD!

CLOUD has had SO MANY features disabled/turned off c.f. to our SERVER 7.17.1 that it just won't work for our User experience.

Nor do we see any need to rush to DATA CENTRE .. Whilst there are LOTS of bugs and long standing (>10 years) feature requests that Atlassian haven't dealt with in SERVER, our SERVER generally works for 99% of our User needs ... so "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" .. "bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" ....  "better the devil you know than the devil you don't" ...

.. no offence, just saying!

Migration from SERVER to CLOUD is not an essential thing to do - I know we'd regret it.

[René T_]

Abandoning Atlassian products after using and introducing for 10+ years makes me feel a bit sad. But maybe it's just the circle of life, as in "all things, from the Void
Called forth, deserve to be destroyed" [Mephistopheles in Goethe, Faust 1, ch.6] and time to move on and find alternative products from companies who succeed better in creating maintainable and upgradeable software.

Whoever advertises to move from on-prem to cloud should better not claim to be sane. Just consider the many reports from data breaches and lost user data from other cloud services. Just no.