New platform releases coming for all Data Center products!

[#1]

Hey there, Data Center community!

I'm Mel, one of the Product Marketing Managers for Data Center. I’m excited to share that in mid-2024, every Data Center product is getting a new platform release! This means we will be releasing:

• Jira Software 10.0

• Jira Service Management 6.0

• Confluence 9.0

• Bitbucket 9.0

• Bamboo 10.0

• Crowd 6.0

These platform releases will provide breaking changes and platform-level improvements, including security and compliance enhancements and increased performance and scalability.

What is a platform release?

Platform releases allow us to incorporate multiple significant changes (often called “breaking changes”) that are not compatible with previous versions. These changes establish a strong foundation for more extensive development in future releases.

Architected for stronger security

We understand the importance of Data Center’s continued evolution to meet your security needs and these releases will provide our most secure offerings yet to safeguard your critical applications and data. To that end, these upcoming releases will include a number of architectural improvements that bring a variety of security improvements, including faster resolution of security incidents with a smaller number of exposed dependencies, and a reduction in false security scans due to the elimination of older code.

To learn more about some of these improvements, read more about the changes we made to our architecture in our recent Developer Community post.

Thanks for being part of the Data Center Community!

-Atlassian’s Data Center team

[John Dunkelberg]

@Mel Policicchio thanks for the update.  Will these new platform releases (ex: Jira Software 10.0) also be LTS releases?

[Mel Policicchio]

Great question @John Dunkelberg the platform releases themselves will not be LTS releases, however, the next LTS releases for Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Confluence will all be on their new platforms (for example, the next Jira Software LTS release will be JSW 10.X where X is a placeholder for the version number) 

[Avin Singhal]

Hi @Mel Policicchio   It was a pain to Upgrade our Confluence Data Center Instance multiple time due to reported Vulnerabilities in 2023 . I hope Atlassian is also running some enhanced penetration testing  on its application from security perspective to evaluate what part of the application is loosely coupled and can be breach .

I expect these new releases to be more stable than 8.x .

As, we are losing Atlassian user-base inside our org both for Jira and confluence to Azure/Freshdesk & Bloomfire/Sharepoint , I am looking for some exciting feature with help of which we can attract our customer back to Atlassian tools .

[Mel Policicchio]

Thanks for your comment @Avin Singhal! I have asked a member of our product team to get back to you, please stay tuned for their response. 

[Michael Andreacchio]

Hi @Avin Singhal, I’m a PM working on Confluence DC and currently focusing on security. I appreciate your comment and hear your concerns around Confluence security, stability, and upgrade requirements.

On the security front I can say that we are treating the vulnerabilities raised in 2023 with the upmost importance. We have mobilised an internal strategy around the causes of the recent issues and have been acting on them with urgency. Confluence DC has also engaged with independent third-party penetration testers to ensure that we receive an independent picture of the state of our application’s security and will be actioning any findings with the appropriate level of urgency.

As a side, all of our Data Center products follow Atlassian’s standard approach for carrying out annual external security testing. Details on our approach can be found on our Security Testing hub.

Regarding stability, as always we would say that the most stable release for customers is our LTS release. As of today, for Confluence our LTS releases are 7.19 and 8.5. Our security backporting policy for LTS fixes can be found on our bugfix policy.

This policy helps to ensure that our LTS releases are the most stable and secure supported versions available to customers, once running on an LTS version it is a matter of upgrade from bugfix release to bugfix release.

We’ll be announcing the version and release timeline of Confluence 9.x LTS soon, please stay tuned here more information. I hope I’ve been able to answer your questions an concerns, feel free to reach out if you’d like to go deeper at any stage 😊

[Rick Carini]

Hi @Michael Andreacchio ,

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Data-Center-articles/New-platform-releases-coming-for-all-Data-Center-products/bc-p/2638180#M827

I believe you have a typo on the Confluence LTS release numbers.

7.13 is no longer one of the LTS releases supported, but 7.19 is.

* https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-7-19-long-term-support-release-change-log-1141976791.html

Your LTS release page is also incorrect:

* https://confluence.atlassian.com/enterprise/long-term-support-releases-948227420.html

[Michael Andreacchio]

Thanks to your eagle eyes @Rick Carini I've gone and fixed my comment and will notify the team internally to get that page updated, it's indeed incorrect. 🙏🏼