Whats the future of Jira Datacenter?

Sagar
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
May 1, 2021

I see that there are many announcements related to the new tools like :

Jira work management

Jira Product Discovery

Compass

Team Control.

Enterprise cloud will have more feature and updates in coming days.

As we are on Jira Datacenter so just curious about what next for datacenter

2 comments

Comment

Log in or Sign up to comment
Carlos Garcia Navarro
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
May 1, 2021

Hi @Sagar , you can check the Atlassian roadmap for Datacenter in this link: https://www.atlassian.com/roadmap/data-center

Like # people like this
Sagar
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
May 1, 2021

Thanks @Carlos Garcia Navarro i have gone through the link, looks like no new major feature release for Jira datacenter in upcoming months mostly on security, compliance etc.

Like # people like this
Carlos Garcia Navarro
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
May 1, 2021

Yeah, the Cloud seems to be the future! ;-)

Like Glen2021 likes this
Sagar
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
May 2, 2021

Yeah,  Cloud first

Like # people like this
Amol Dongare May 2, 2021

What about the Atlassain tool's customers who never wants to go on cloud? 

Like Deniz Oğuz likes this
Dirk Ronsmans
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
May 3, 2021

Well it's a very controversial topic, eventually companies will need to decide on why they don't want to go to the cloud (data protection, confidentiality, trust,..) and look towards the tools that support their own vision.

I always ask clients "why don't you want to go to Cloud" and the answers I usually get are a bit vague or mainly from a point of fear. 

I'm sure Datacenter will remain available for the time to come (years) but you will miss out on new features and functionalities.

The funny thing is that for things like an Office365 or other work management tools the Cloud is often the only solution that is offered and people don't worry about that. I feel that the shift from Server to Cloud is now what causes the backlash.

"It's always easier to give something than to take something away"

So while perhaps not what you want to hear (and also my full personal opinion on the subject), for the near future you can go to Datacenter and see how Cloud evolves. Should it come to a point that you are no longer happy with Datacenter and Cloud is not an option, you'll simply have to do a new tool selection and seek out a took that does fit your requirements.

Keep in mind tho that this strategy of Cloud first/only is not unique to Atlassian, all major vendors will provide either only a Cloud solution or are in a very similar position as Atlassian where they are moving towards Cloud.

Like # people like this
Amol Dongare May 3, 2021

Hi @Dirk Ronsmans  Thanks for the explanation, it helps ! , the most common reason to not go on cloud is that you mentioned data protection, confidentiality. 

Dirk Ronsmans
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
May 3, 2021

That's the thing. 

At one point in time you'll have to trust the companies you work with. You have contracts with them which will define what happens to your data en how it will be managed.

Let's say I have my HR Payroll excel sheet and it syncs to my onedrive as a backup. Do you think anybody really thinks about that? Probably not because it's a seamless sync and it doesn't feel like a "cloud" solution.

In our day to day lives we are all happy to throw all our information on social media and other platforms without giving it a second thought. But when it comes to company data, suddenly our weekly restaurant menu has to be safeguarded like it contains the nuclear launch codes :)

Perspective is everything!

Amol Dongare May 3, 2021

:) yes ! 

Darryl Lee
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
May 3, 2021

If you (or anyone interested in this topic) has an Team 2021 All Access Pass, there's a great talk by Greg Warner about asking the hard questions to get past "this is how we've always done it.

"What I wish I'd known: Moving Splunk’s 10,000 users to cloud"

Like JimmyVanAU likes this
Michael Bachmann May 17, 2021

@Dirk Ronsmans I seriously have to disagree with your point of view and I find very narrow minded regarding all the different companies with their different necessities that are out there.

Please don't get me wrong, I sincerely don't mean any offence, but as you stated previously this is a very controversial topic and especially after this years Team2021 I'm quite disappointed.

Security and privacy

All the reasons mentioned so far by Atlassian as to why someone would prefer to stay on-premise revolve solely around security and privacy, you even mentioned a "vague" fear and I would maybe even add missing knowledge or misunderstanding on "how cloud works".

I don't want to say to much on this topic, but nonetheless there are still enough reasons as to why I would prefer to keep specific data on-premise rather than in (any) cloud.
To follow your example of your HR payroll: you can do whatever you want with your own data, but when in comes to ~20000 payrolls of our employees and customers (as we do) it's a different story entirely.

Features and personalization

I have a very concrete example apart from this security and privacy trope that makes me want to choose on-premise over cloud: features and personalization, or rather the lack thereof in regards to the cloud solution.

A big part of this "features and personalization" theme are apps and I just want to make two examples, one of which I came across just today.

We use ScriptRunner to do lots of things, like automating certain steps that are not possible with workflow post-functions, import and export data from and to various external systems that do not support web services (yes they still exist) or the whole "fragments" functionality to show buttons and screen that "do stuff".

And simply put, many of these things are simply not possible on ScriptRunner for Jira Cloud, they even have an entire Confluence page on what is not available.
As a developer myself I can perfectly understand why certain functionality is not made available or even possible in a cloud infrastructure, but that doesn't change the fact that it is possible on-premise and is working perfectly fine there.

Another example is Tempo Timesheets which I upgraded just yesterday to the latest version in our on-premise instance. Today people started complaining that a specific feature wasn't working as it did just the day before.
The reason was that in one of the newer versions Tempo "fixed" an issue by removing said feature to align it with their cloud version:

Fixed: Issue lists and group by issue in the My Work Timesheet view now work the same as in Tempo Cloud

All of our users rely heavily on this feature that has worked perfectly fine up until now and admittedly I really don't know what I'm supposed to do now, I'm literally lost.
I rolled back to the previous version in the meantime, but that won't work forever.

"Continued investments in data center"

The last thing I want to say, and which annoys me personally the most, is that late last year when Atlassian announced the end of the server version they also increased the price for data center quite significantly to "continue investments in data center" which generally sounded promising.

Now, a few months later I'm really wondering: where are these investments?
The public roadmap for data center is literally devoid of any kind of new feature compared to the cloud variants of each product and especially when looking at any user-facing feature.

To conclude this way-to-long-but-still-not-long-enough-post I must say that I'm simply disappointed and tired.
I have spent lots and lots of time in these past few years implementing Jira and Confluence in our organization and remodeling our "way of work" and we are still far from finished, yet the future already seems very bleak.

Greetings,
Michael

Like # people like this
Deniz Oğuz
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
May 17, 2021

Hi,

Unfortunately Cloud APIs has very serious limitations which prevents us from porting our apps to cloud. Cloud allows you to integrate something to Jira but not allow you to customize existing functionality of Jira. 

You can add links, panels, pages, buttons to integrate a functionality but for some customers this is not enough. They want to change how Jira works. For example they want to show a dialog when you hover on a component on the issue page and show you extra information about that component. They want to capture summary and description of the issue while their user filling the issue and show them extra information before they create the issue. You can't even implement a simple "act as another user" functionality in cloud.

You can do whatever you want with Jira Server/DC but not with Jira Cloud.  

Dirk Ronsmans
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
May 18, 2021

Hi @Michael Bachmann and thanks for writing out a well thought out comment. I certainly invite discussion around the topic!

I can understand that my point of view comes of as narrow minded but for me it was more ment to be a high level overview of what I have encountered among my clients as to the reason why they say they cannot move to Cloud.

Of course there will always be customers for which a move to Cloud is not ideal or even impossible due to the nature of their business, I was merely trying to summarize the main reasons I've seen and how I (personally) view them.

On whether or not to move to the Cloud on based on your data is something that needs to be viewed case by case and should the data really be impossible to leave the premise then I fear in the future (with both Atlassian and other tool vendors) it will be come more and more difficult to actually find a solution that will provide an on premise product.

 

Now when it comes to Features and personnalisation, I fully agree they have a long way to go to close the gap between DC and Cloud. I'm however hopeful that with the time that there still is (Feb' 2024) they will be able to close most of it and also the app vendors will be able to. The shift to Cloud first is something that also app vendors need to take time to process and see whether they want to follow the trend, move away from the ecosystem, switch to Forge development, and many many more choices. (but like I said, hopeful that this will become more clear over the coming months and years) Being both an on prem and cloud user I feel your pain. There is no concistency between the 2 platforms. 

However moving forward I think we're fighting a losing battle when we try to hold on to our older legacy systems and way of working and we will simply need to trust that both the app vendors and Atlassian will move in a good direction (with some moments of failure) and by the time we really need to go to Cloud we will be happy with the product there too.

They are investing a lot in how we can manage releases and changes to apps and the environment too (think of sandboxes, release tracks, ..) to test out changes and flag them before they become problematic.

My personal opinion (which is why I like to discuss it, but maybe we should create a new discussion for that :)) is that (if we move to cloud) we will not work in the exact same way but the outcome and value we derive from it will be the same. Processes should evolve so maybe that's also a time to grab the chance and see where you can change (and possibly improve the way work is being done)

 

When we talk about Datacenter, I had a strong belief like yourself that they would continue investing in DC and maybe even bring it as a Cloud version but then hosted in your own controlled environment. This way at least the experience would be the same but you could manage it like a Server version. Like you mention I feel (unfortunately) that we need to let go of that idea. Sure they will continue to invest in providing DC specific features and upgrades but as you can probably also derive from the Team21 talks, all the new shiny products will only go to Cloud.

 

TL;DR: So in conclusion, I was merely summarizing what I hear from customers and how I perceive the evolving Atlassian ecosystem. I sometimes just get very frustrated that people literally throw their personal data at anything they can find on the internet and yet are reluctant to even think about doing the same with their business data while the product they are putting it in to would be a lot more structured and contained.

Final two cents, only time will tell how the environment evolves. If users decide to move to another platform because the product not longer meets their expectations then that is just as good. Companies have visions about the road ahead and sadly they don't always match with 100% of their customers.

TAGS
AUG Leaders

Atlassian Community Events