Data Center Digest Q4 2022

[#1]

Hi there, Data Center community! I’m Mel, part of the Data Center marketing team here at Atlassian. I’m excited to share our latest Data Center Digest, providing you with a quick overview of recent and soon-to-be-shipped highlights for our Data Center products! Please visit the Data Center roadmap for more insight into our upcoming releases.

Platform and Long Term Support (LTS) Releases

SHIPPED LTS releases for Jira Software and Jira Service Management

We have just launched our latest Long Term Support releases for Jira Software and Jira Service Management. These releases include dozens of great upgrades, including enhanced security, optimized performance, secure application tunnels to help you connect to cloud products, and much more. With this LTS release, Automation for Jira (A4J) will be included as native functionality in Jira Software Data Center and Jira Service Management Data Center. A4J supports thousands of use cases, such as synchronizing parent and sub-tasks, smart auto-assigning, tracking SLAs, the ability to act on linked issues, and more. For the complete list of upgrades, check out our release announcement post.

SHIPPED Bamboo 9.0

Bamboo 9.0 is now available. We purpose-built this platform release to help your enterprise team securely build, test, and deploy code with stronger performance and a modernized look and feel.

As you know, platform releases include multiple backward-incompatible changes (or “breaking changes”) which establish a foundation for continuous improvement in future releases. This platform release includes security, user interface, and accessibility upgrades. Bamboo 9.0 also features enhanced integration with Bitbucket Cloud through webhooks, faster artifact transfer, and the REST API documentation now in Swagger. Learn more about Bamboo 9.0.

COMING SOON Confluence 8.0

Confluence 8.0 will release soon, targeted for CY22 Q4. Platform releases allow us to lay the foundations for future Confluence 8.x releases, and will include some breaking changes and significant platform upgrades. We built this release to empower growing enterprises to remain confident in their security while enabling users with productivity features optimized for easy collaboration. Read all about Confluence 8.0 in the Developer Community.

COMING SOON Bitbucket LTS release

We’ve recently announced the first LTS release of CY23, Bitbucket 8.9, coming in Q1. This release will include powerful features such as improvements to Bitbucket Mesh, archiving to help you declutter unused repositories, and secret scanning to notify you of accidentally exposed tokens, private keys, passwords, or environment variables. To see all the features available, read the Bitbucket LTS announcement.

COMING SOON Bamboo Data Center’s first LTS release

Bamboo 9.2 will be the first LTS release for Bamboo Data Center, coming in CY23 Q1. If you plan to upgrade your Bamboo instance only once this year, we recommend moving to 9.2 when it becomes available. This release will support better performance and enhanced security through features like rate limiting, build resiliency, and cold standby high availability. For a full list of updates, read the Bamboo LTS announcement.

Accessibility updates

Last quarter, we shipped several updates to Jira and Confluence improving their usability for keyboard-only and screen reader users. We remediated 9 low-vision issues across those products (see details here for Jira and here for Confluence). Additionally, we solved, or are actively working to solve, 131 accessibility issues for keyboard-only users (see details here for Jira and here for Confluence).

In addition to the recently shipped accessibility updates, we are continuing work on several updates across Jira and Confluence focused on assistive tech users (including screenreader users). These updates should all be available by the end of CY23 Q1.

COMING SOON Jira accessibility features

• The calendar popups in the Edit Sprint and Create issue dialog boxes will become accessible for screen reader and keyboard-only users

• Screen reader users will be able to scan through the comments in Jira tickets

• Improved reading order for Scrum Board Issues

• New keyboard and screen reader accessibility for the Kanban Board issues drag and drop feature

COMING SOON Confluence accessibility features

• Screen readers will no longer experience a CAPTCHA blocking the login

• Improved reading order for some modals (Create a page, Create a space)

• Added appropriate roles and attributes for combo boxes on the Create a New Page, Edit a Page, Create a Space, and View profile components

• Using Team Calendars focus will move onto the modal

• The C, E, and M shortcuts will be possible to turn off

New updates, product features, and version releases

SHIPPED Several high-friction bugs were removed from Jira

Last quarter, we removed hundreds of high-friction bugs from Jira, including an issue with the attachment button and performance degradation with bulk issue move operations. We know that these and many other pain points have added up over the years. To better serve our Data Center users, Atlassian has boosted investment in resolving the bugs that slow your workday and cause unnecessary frustration. Stay tuned to this Community space for more detailed information about our recent and upcoming Jira bug fixes. 

SHIPPED Secret Scanning, default tasks, and a new user permissions page for Bitbucket

Bitbucket 8.3 brought a built-in secret scanner. This powerful tool helps enterprises improve their security posture by scanning all code changes for sensitive data or credentials like private keys, passwords, access tokens, etc. If credentials accidentally fall into the wrong hands, the whole organization can quickly face serious security issues. With the secret scanner on guard, any data that looks suspicious is found and reported immediately, giving you precious time for mitigation.

Additionally, Bitbucket 8.4 allows users to create consistent processes with default tasks for pull requests. Admins can now configure tasks that are automatically created when a pull request is opened at the project or repository level. Developers will no longer need to manually create the same tasks for each pull request to satisfy team processes, boosting productivity.

To help you use Bitbucket more effectively, we redesigned permission pages in Bitbucket 8.5 so you can more easily manage user permissions. These now display all user permissions (both explicit and inherited) and added filters to help you quickly find users and permissions even in repositories that have many users and groups. You can manage user and group permissions in bulk and also select user groups to quickly explore members of user groups.

SHIPPED Node scalability

Now live with Jira Software 9.1-9.3 and Jira Service Management 5.1-5.3, users may improve node scalability and reliability, particularly for larger more complex instances, with indexing improvements. This allows you to horizontally scale your instance without facing performance degradation. This update resolves the indexing distribution problem and the cache issues you may experience for users, groups, and licenses.

COMING SOON Domain & Email Allowlist/Blocklist and Guardrails for Jira Service Management

Soon, Jira Service Management will release guardrails to help you better manage your scaling team. Guardrails are product-based documentation and strategic recommendations designed to educate and help you avoid reaching a tipping point at which your instance might start to experience performance impacts. Guardrails will help communicate the expected effects of growing data types, such as comments or issues, and provide you with the controls, insight, and capabilities you need to keep data in line.

Additionally, the Jira Service Management team is working to release new domain and email allowlist/blocklist features. This will allow you to use allowlists and blocklists to receive the email requests you want while filtering out the ones you don’t, saving time and keeping your inbox tidy.

COMING SOON Bamboo Kubernetes Ephemeral Agents

In the upcoming months, Bamboo will add functionality to run Ephemeral Agents in the Kubernetes (K8) environment. This will allow for build isolation, as each execution of a Bamboo job or deployment environment will run on a newly created remote agent that will contain exactly the tools needed for the job. The agent will run the job and then delete itself for build isolation. Additionally, such types of agents will allow for more flexibility to deploy an agile, scalable build infrastructure on demand.

Thanks for reading this Data Center Digest and please remember to visit the Data Center roadmap for even more insight into our upcoming releases. If you’re not yet a member of the Data Center Community, use the blue “join” button in the right margin of this page to ensure you get all the latest Data Center updates delivered right to your inbox.

[John Dunkelberg]

@Mel Policicchio - heads up that the JAC ticket you link to returns "The requested filter doesn't exist or is private."

Thanks for the update across Data Center.

[Mel Policicchio]

Thank you for letting me know @John Dunkelberg! I have removed that link until I can find a suitable replacement.  

[Wendy Fox-Jensen]

Hi Mel! I'm the product owner for JIRA platform in our org, and we're just standing up JIRA DC for a proof of concept with Insights/Discovery. What are we calling it now? Got to say I'm slightly disappointed and frustrated that such a mature, widespread and well-understood product doesn't ship with a pro-forma backlog for installation, admin, post-install config, etc. We are starting from scratch with our epics when it could be so much smoother. Anyone out there care to share their effective backlog for this?

Thanks!

[Dave Liao]

@Mel Policicchio - FYI, just posted a pointer to this page from the Enterprise group!

There's a lot of folks there who would be interested in these updates. 🙏

[Mel Policicchio]

Thanks for your question, @Wendy Fox-Jensen I have reached out to our Jira team to try and find an answer for you!

And thanks for sharing the Data Center love, @Dave Liao! 

[Wendy Fox-Jensen]

@Mel Policicchio thanks! That would be super valuable.