Confluence Data Center 9.0 has been released and delivers platform-level improvements

[#1]

Hey there, Data Center Community!

I'm Andy, one of the product managers for Confluence Data Center. I’m excited to share that Confluence Data Center 9.0 is now available! This platform release delivers significant platform-level improvements including security and compliance enhancements, increased performance and scalability, and new productivity capabilities for end-users.

Platform releases drive compelling value as they allow us to include multiple backward-incompatible changes (or “breaking changes”), which establish a foundation for continuous improvement and value in future Data Center releases. Read on to explore how Confluence 9.0 enables growing enterprises to remain confident in their security posture, while offering users features optimised for productivity.

Security and compliance

Confluence continues to evolve to meet your security needs. The 9.0 release brings our most secure release yet, with updates and improvements made to strengthen the platform's overall security posture. These updates help protect your critical applications and valuable data and include:

• New default HTTP security headers: Ensures improved security connectivity via the browser and hardening against XSS or clickjacking.

• Software Bill of Materials (SBOM): Provides an inventory of product dependencies, helping admins facilitate a smooth integration into automated security checks.

• Platform upgrades: Upgrades to Data Center’s shared stack of third-party dependencies, resolves technical debt, and removes application Gray APIs.

• Architectural upgrades: Product centric dependency upgrades targeting the improvement of Confluence’s overall security posture such as Jackson, Jersey, jQuery, TinyMCE, and more.

• Stored backups health check: Warns admins if there are backups stored on the application file system via new Atlassian Troubleshooting and Support Tools (ATST) health check. This helps to avoid possible exposure of confidential customer data in the case of an attack.

• Improved accessibility: Further removal of blocking issues that prevent assistive technology users, including screen readers, from completing essential tasks in product.

• Two-step verification: A more secure login experience supporting two-step verification (2SV) by allowing admins to add a second authentication layer using time-based, one-time password (TOTP) as an additional factor. COMING SOON

Productivity and ease of use

By removing friction in workflows and providing ease-of-use improvements, Confluence 9.0 empowers users to communicate more effectively, and in their preferred medium. To increase the speed at which teams can collaborate, we’ve added some highly-requested features to the 9.0 release such as:

• Dark theme: Users can choose between light and dark theme as their preferred interface to help with improved screen focus, reduction of eye strain, and increased contrast for better accessibility.

• Word count for pages and blogs: While editing, users can now see the total or highlighted number of words and characters on a page or blog.

• Estimated page read time: To enable users to better manage their time and commit to reading the right pages, we now display an estimated read time underneath the title of a page or blog.

Performance and scale

Confluence 9.0 brings administrators more visibility into operations, increased control over data, and an overall better performing instance, leading to more productive work through speed and ease of use. Increases to performance at scale have been worked on via a number of features, including:

• OpenSearch: This opt-in search engine will provide more advanced instance indexing options, leading to less processing requirements and faster search results.

• New REST APIs for content management: More REST APIs to help admins automate, script, and scale content management tasks such as performing page moves, managing attachments, and organising labels and watchers.

• REST API documentation facelift: A modernised look and feel for our REST API documentation now on the Swagger framework, making our API docs easier to navigate, find examples, and copy snippets from.

Supported third-party platforms

To ensure we’re compatible modern and supported offerings, we’ve updated the third-party platforms that the application runs on. This makes Confluence compatible with a broader range of secure and reliable platforms within your organisation, which now include:

• PostgreSQL 16 support: PostgreSQL 16, the latest database version preferred by many customers, is now compatible with Confluence.

• Java 21 support: The latest long term support release for Java is now compatible with Confluence, enabling customers to take advantage of its new features.

• Java 11 end of support: We’re saying goodbye to Java 11, which made its debut in 2018, and is set to reach its end of life (EOL) around October 2024.

Many of you must be eagerly anticipating an upgrade. We highly recommend that all customers start planning their next Confluence Data Center upgrade for Confluence 9.2, our upcoming Long Term Support release (LTS), which is coming soon!

In the meantime, you can head over to our downloads page for the latest version of Confluence or read the Confluence 9.0 release notes to learn more.

Thanks for being part of our Data Center community, and please share any questions or comments below!

Confluence Data Center Team

[Dave Liao]

Super excited about this - and quite surprised for some reason. 😂 

[Ollie Guan]

i think v9.2 the next LTS will coming soon 😃

[Dave Liao]

... okay, that's my fault for being surprised.

I totally forgot that Confluence 8 came out in late 2022. 🤣