Introduction to Confluence and Its Advantages?

[Aerolla Sarika]

Welcome to Confluence Tutorials. The objective of these tutorials is to provide in depth understand of Confluence.

In addition to free Confluence Tutorials, we will cover common interview questions, issues and how to’s of Confluence.

Introduction

Confluence is team collaboration software. Written in Java and mainly used in corporate environments, it is developed and marketed by Atlassian. Confluence is sold as either on-premises software or as a software as a service.

Confluence Server Developer Documentation

Getting Started

There are two main ways to develop with Confluence Server — using our remote API or developing a plugin. If you’re integrating Confluence with another application, you’ll most likely want to use the remote API. If you’d like to add capabilities to Confluence, a plugin may be the answer. To get started writing plugins, download the plugin SDK and follow the instructions to set up a plugin development environment.

Confluence Data Center

This page provides a high level overview of options and considerations for large enterprises using Confluence. If you want to find out how to make sure Confluence can scale with your organization this information is for you.

For a detailed overview of Confluence’s clustering solution see Confluence Data Center Technical Overview. For help with installation, take a look at Installing Confluence Data Center.

Clustered Confluence

Confluence Data Center is designed to support the unique, and complex requirements of enterprise organizations. It is a clustered solution that can provide performance at scale and high availability.

Confluence Data Center enables you to configure a cluster similar to the one pictured here with:

-Multiple server nodes

-A shared file system

-A database that all nodes read and write to.

-A load balancer to evenly direct requests to each node.

All nodes are active and process requests. A user will access the same node for all requests until their session times out, they log out, or a node is removed from the cluster.

Instant scalability

Licensing is based on users, not the number of nodes in your cluster. This means you can join additional nodes to your cluster at any time, making it very easy to adapt as your usage grows.

Achieving high availability

High availability, or HA, means that a system is available without interruption. HA is necessary if you have SLA’s or other commitments such as 99.99% up time.

If a Confluence Data Center node fails, is shut down or disconnected from the network the rest of the cluster will continue operating – as long as one node remains. When a node fails the load balancer stops sending requests to that node and redirects requests to the remaining nodes. Users will be directed to another node seamlessly.

Some things you can do alongside Confluence Data Center to minimize single points of failure include ensuring that your:

• Load balancer
• Database
• Shared file systems
• External user management

are all highly available. An example of a highly available Confluence installation is shown here.

With all of the above in place, the only time you should need to bring down your entire cluster is to upgrade Confluence itself. Confluence Data Center requires all nodes to be stopped to perform the upgrade.

Most other maintenance can be performed by bringing down individual nodes, as nodes can leave and rejoin the cluster without disruption.

Failover

It is important to note that Confluence Data Center nodes must be able to communicate between one another with minimal latency and therefore must be located in the same physical location.

Warm failover can be achieved by syncing your Confluence data to a data center in a different geographical location and switching over in the event of a failure. This solution is not automatic, and requires manual intervention, but can provide failover in the case of a major failure in your primary data center.

Confluence Installation Guide

Before installing Confluence, please check that you meet the minimum system requirements.

If you’ve chosen a package that includes add-ons such as Confluence Questions, Team Calendars or the SharePoint Connector you’ll need to install these from within Confluence after setup is complete. See Finding new add-ons for how to find and install add-ons.

Installation Type

There are two methods of installing Confluence, using an installer, or manually from a standalone zip or archive file.

Install Confluence using an installer

Windows

Linux

This is the easiest method for installing Confluence. If you’re evaluating Confluence, use this option or try Confluence Cloud free.

Install Confluence from a zip or archive file

Windows

Linux

This option requires you to manually install files and configure some system properties. Use this option if there isn’t an installer for your operating system.

The EAR/WAR distribution is no longer available, you should use this option if you previously deployed Confluence into an existing application server.

Install Confluence in a cluster

Windows or Linux

Confluence Data Center is a clustered solution for large enterprises. Read the Confluence Data Center Technical Overview to find out if Confluence Data Center is right for your organization.

Confluence Advantages

This section describes some specific use cases for Confluence.

Using Confluence for technical documentation:

A technical communicator’s guide to using Confluence – see Develop Technical Documentation in Confluence.

Setting up a knowledge base: 

A support engineer’s guide to using Confluence as a knowledge base – see Use Confluence as a Knowledge Base.

Setting up an intranet:

A quick guide to setting up an intranet wiki – see Use Confluence as your Intranet.

Confluence for software teams:

A series of blog posts to help your agile team get the most out of Confluence. See Confluence for Software Teams.

[Mirek]

Nice idea. Would be great to update it a little bit now, maybe add some screenshots and working links instead of "See... "