server policy change - but no custom domains - this is a nightmare

Martin Posch October 17, 2020

server policy change - but no custom domains - this is a nightmare

On the one hand your are stopping support for OnPremise Products.

On the other Hand the cloud just is not ready for us - we need a custom domain for confluence.

(and you even stopped bringing this feature forward - see your Jira CLOUD-6999)

 

This is ridiculous and basically means strategic move away from confluence

6 comments

Ole Nymoen October 17, 2020

Agreed. Tragic.

What you get when someone thinks greedy is good. And the really insulting thing, arguing that "these changes are in service of setting your organization up for long-term success". Quote from the email we got.

These changes are for Atlassian to earn more, and will most likely force quite a few customers away from their product suite.

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silverb October 17, 2020

Ha, bravo. I just send a thread saying they should take back the decision. And they deleted my post.

Maybe they will also considering delete my license?

David Tonhofer October 17, 2020

This is shockingly sad and, yes, a costumer railroading.

Big Accounts will probably be able to weather this, but small ones?

Not on-premise is/used-to-be BAD. In my former-to-last company we had Cloud (licensed for a couple of hundred users) It had unbearably long response times (we never solved this problem). It was also hard to manage as one didn't have access to anything under the surface of the GUI, in particular the DB. Maybe things have improved in the intervening years? I sure hope so for other's sake.

I'm currently using a Confluence Server for 3 people (the house owners) running on an AWS "small" instance (2 GiB RAM, 1 vCPU ... that's about 0.5 real CPU) about 1500km away which is much faster.

That's that. Not going back to "Cloud".

Plus, the cloud may be in Australia. What's the legal status here? Big names may want to care. Last I heard about Australia, there was a certain governmental overreach. Well, that's for legal departments to flesh out, not directly one of my worries.

In any case, server product is out too for me -- unless I'm badly mistaken, the new pricing removes Confluence server for 10 users and the smallest license starts at USD 1600, up from a few bucks per year (plus external AWS cost, of course. No third party licenses for plug-ins though). That's a fat nope, unaffordable.

Back to FosWiki then.

 

 

Wolfram Webers October 18, 2020

As far as I know they use datacenters in Europe and the US. And US is pretty much the more significant part, at least for me. Why the heck should I trust my intellectual property to the US and rely on a crappy single sided SCC?

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Wolfram Webers October 17, 2020

Wanted to cancel my on-prem subscription after receiving the mail about the cloud only policy today. However, I cannot even login into my account anymore!

I seriously liked and promoted their products, but now the end of the road has been reached...

Jaap October 17, 2020

Oh my god, I just stumbled upon this thread by accident, but I'm a bit shocked by this news, as I'm both a OnPrem as well as an Atlassian enthousiast.

I wonder if Atlassian forgot to take into account that the ones that install and administer Confluence are quite often the ones promoting the product the most as well. It might be good on short term for sales margin, however on the longer term roadmap I think Atlassian should reflect a bit on the question - "why would anyone in IT promote a product they can't add any value though ?" - before proceeding with this.

@Atlassian Support: as we live in a world with lots of questionable statements at the moment: is this true, that Atlassian will move to cloud-only and no OnPremise?

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Gerald Hochegger October 18, 2020

The stock price jumped 8% on Friday - yeah good idea - milk your customers once more.

For me not - I put my servers behind a VPN and operate them the next 10 years without paying Atlassian anything (and for sure not for the "no improvements just important fixes" phase until 2024)

Many users do not like changes anyway - so I would say this is a win-win situation - software does not change anymore and we do not have to pay anything ;)

In the mean time I'll be searching/testing alternatives  - xwiki.org - is a first candidate.

Wolfram Webers October 18, 2020

@Gerald Hochegger Awesome! Thanks for the link.

BTW: There're some public authorities here in Sweden I have contact with and I worked for, and of which I know are using Jira, Bitbucket and Confluence right now.

I definately will contact them and encourage NOT to continue with Atlassian. They store informationen NOT to be meant being stored on Atlassians servers where Atlassians data center admins may have access to. They'll not be happy at all with such a stupid decision... Not here in Europe.

Interesting also Atlassians lobby work for "zero trust" and not offering any reasonable solution for that. Just plain customer lock-in and lobby work how good cloud solutions are. Unfortunately, there is a bunch of CIOs and CTOs out there buying this chit-chat.

Aron Gombas _Midori_
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October 18, 2020

There will be an on-premise option offered: the Data Center deployment type. You can use a single node Data Center and it is roughly the equivalent of Server.

(it's more expensive, but offers some additional features even if you don't need clustering.) 

Gerald Hochegger October 18, 2020

Data Center it's not more expensive - it's simply not affordable.

Migrating our 15000 Confluence users to data center would cost $154.000 now and $250.000 after 2.2.2021 - this is insane!

Additionally Atlassian permanently emphasizes they are "cloud first" and the innovation is primary in the cloud version - why should we invest in stranded technology?

Furthermore who ensures me that next year, when someone at Atlassian thinks they are in need for some bucks, nearly doubles the prices again - I've lost my trust in Atlassian completely.

And in two years maybe Atlassian feels it would be a good time to ditch on-premise completely  - forget it.

Atlassian products have become popular also because many engineers installed the then very affordable Jira/Confluence server and helped out colleges and convinced management to try Atlassian - with your pricing strategy and "only cloud matters" policy you will loose this valuable user base.

But that will hopefully not be a problem for me anymore - I'm done with Atlassian.

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Wolfram Webers October 18, 2020

Same here: Comparing data center prices with the former on-prem prices just shows Atlassians change of mind towards megalomania. Looks like someone in the management realized they reached a critical mass of paying customers to initiate that cloud only move to please their shareholders even more with such a hillarious raise of the price tag.

Anyway. I'm also done with Atlassian and will do my lobby work to ditch Atlassian completely and as soon as possible.

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Vitor LC
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October 20, 2020

I have to join my voice to the others.

This solution is at a first glance not bearable, not even in 4-years time. Many organisations use sensitive information, and they have enterprise licenses for thousands or tens of thousands of users. The core meaning of confidentiality and sensitive data is not to be shared with anyone else, no matter how many security compliances and certifications you may have, and it's hard for me to believe that those organisations will move to the Cloud. We may believe that whatever we say to a priest will be locked in its own head and will never come out, however it's always a big risk for the confidant and sometimes to the priest, depending who the confidant is.

If you have an hybrid solution, as other players in the market, it will allow us to still have the on-prem for the classified information and the cloud to the less sensitive, but I reckon it will bring a big increase to the price, if a proper price strategy for a bundled solution is not put in place.

If the use of the Data Center comes as the hybrid solution that will definitely kill the ones that have no need for this kind of juggernaut solution, both in price and requirements. I understand companies need to evolve in several ways, and there's always a thin line when merging its interests with the users own interests without losing much with it. However, maybe this strategy has been a bit too adventurous and it may bring dire consequences not only for us, the ones using and championing Atlassian's products, but also for Atlassian itself.

I don't know about others but I am a Confluence/Jira administrator for seven years, I follow the news with some regularity, and still this fell on my lap as a surprise...

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