Platform and LTS releases, Guardrails, and more: Don’t miss these Data Center updates for CY22 Q3!

[#1]

Hi there, Data Center community! I’m Mel, part of the Data Center marketing team here at Atlassian. I’m back with another quarterly update for our Data Center community, providing all of you with a quick overview of recently and soon-to-be-shipped highlights for our Data Center products! For more insight into our upcoming releases, please visit the Data Center roadmap.

Platform and Long Term Support (LTS) Releases

SHIPPED Jira Software 9.0 and Jira Service Management 5.0

We have released our latest Jira platform release, Jira Software 9.0 and Jira Service Management 5.0. This platform release focuses on improvements to security, performance, and automation capabilities. To help teams work more efficiently and effectively, Automation for Jira (A4J) is now included natively in Jira Software Data Center and Jira Service Management Data Center from JSW 9.0 and JSM 5.0 and beyond. For those running earlier versions, A4J is now a zero-dollar app for Data Center customers in the marketplace. Automation provides a variety of benefits, from increased autonomy to automated task creation. To learn more, read the Jira Software 9.0 release notes or the Jira Service Management 5.0 release notes.

COMING SOON Upcoming LTS releases for Jira Software and Jira Service Management

We are also excited to share upcoming Long Term Support releases for Jira Software and Jira Service Management, targeted for release in CY22 Q4. This release will include dozens of great upgrades, including enhanced security, optimized performance, secure application tunnels to help you connect to cloud products, and much more. For the full list of upgrades, check out our Jira LTS Announcement.

SHIPPED Don’t miss the latest Confluence LTS release

We recently released Confluence 7.19, the latest Long Term Support (LTS) release for Confluence Server and Data Center. Building to this release, the Confluence teams have focused on building incredible user value by shipping product improvements and new features, as well as tackling over 245 issues to ensure we have a high-quality, high-value release. Upgrade to Confluence 7.19 for great new features such as:

• Database password encryption

• OAuth 2.0

• New application metrics

• Updated VPAT documents

• Support for databases

• And more!

COMING SOON Confluence 8.0

We are now focused on preparing for the upcoming Confluence 8.0 release, 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. With the Confluence 8 platform, you can look forward to improvements such as Java 17 runtime support, Lucene API isolation, and several more powerful performance and security upgrades. Read all about Confluence 8.0 in the Developer Community.

COMING SOON Bamboo 9.0

In the coming weeks, Bamboo 9.0 for Server and Data Center will release, launching a new platform with optimized security and performance improvements designed to help your teams work more efficiently as you scale. Learn more about Bamboo 9.0’s coming EAP in the Developer Community.

COMING SOON Looking ahead to Bamboo’s first LTS release

In CY22 Q4, we are also releasing the first LTS release for Bamboo Data Center. This release will include security and performance improvements and all the features we've released since 8.0, our first Data Center release. Learn more about Bamboo’s first Data Center LTS and get ready to take advantage of improvements to reliability through build resiliency and rate limiting, instant scalability with Kubernetes deployments, and more robust user management with single sign-on.

Cross-product features

SHIPPED COMING SOON Accessibility for Jira and Confluence

We know accessibility is a critical component of your software and continue to build toward accessibility as one of the core pillars of our software development process. Recent updates to Jira Software have removed some critical issues for low-vision and keyboard-only users, including improvements to accessibility for buttons, links, and icons.

Additionally, we are also addressing key issues surrounding the keyboard alone and screen reader focus within Jira Software and Confluence modals including:

• Complete sprint

• Create project

• Create board

• Create a new page

• Create team space

I am happy to share that these modal issues will be resolved in upcoming Jira and Confluence releases. As we build for future releases, the Jira Software and Confluence teams plan to finish removing critical issues for keyboard-only users in both products and will begin to remediate the critical bugs for screen reader users.

Additionally, the Jira Service Management team has also shipped fixes to resolve critical user interface accessibility issues related to the Insight Asset Management issue raised in their latest VPAT assessment.

SHIPPED Guardrails for Jira Software and Confluence

We know that many of you operate large and complex instances, with impressive growth goals. With that, some of you may be concerned about your data growth and how it might impact your instance performance. We are committed to ensuring you can continually meet those goals without performance or reliability degradation for your users. To try and alleviate such concerns we have introduced product guardrails for Jira Software and Confluence!

At its core, 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.

I want to caveat that Guardrails are based on real-world experiences with some of our largest customers, but won’t necessarily be representative of every organization’s experience. Guardrails DO NOT communicate hard or exact limits nor guarantee that performance degradation won’t happen. They educate you when your instance is at a greater risk of performance degradation. Learn more about Guardrails for Jira Software or Guardrails for Confluence.

Coming soon: Guardrails for Jira Service Management!

SHIPPED In-product diagnostics through native Java Flight Recorder for Jira Software, Confluence, and Bitbucket

Accurately diagnosing and troubleshooting problems with Java apps can be a tough task that requires digging through gigabytes of logs to figure out what exactly went wrong. New updates to Jira Software, Confluence, and Bitbucket supercharge your ability to identify and resolve problems as they occur by bundling with the Java Flight Recorder, a lightweight diagnostic tool for analyzing and troubleshooting apps at runtime.

SHIPPED App Monitoring for Jira Software and Confluence

Check out the latest versions of Jira Software and Confluence to see how you can gain greater insight into the utilization and performance of third-party apps via performance and usage metrics. Many of you already use JMX to monitor things such as memory usage and CPU utilization. Now you can turn on application monitoring to get an even more granular view of the new app-specific metrics. For Jira Software users, I highly recommend reviewing our recent App monitoring post from Senior Product Manager Mike Ni highlighting this new feature.

New product features and version releases

SHIPPED Bitbucket 8.3

We released Bitbucket 8.3 earlier this month, which bundled Bitbucket with the Java Flight Recorder and brought the first release of secret scanning. As Bitbucket continues to build with DevOps in mind, we are developing more secret scanning features for future Bitbucket releases. Read the Bitbucket 8.3 release notes and check out the Data Center roadmap for a full view of everything coming to Bitbucket in the coming months.

Thanks for reading this Data Center update and please remember to visit the Data Center roadmap for more insight into our upcoming releases! If you’re not a member of the Data Center Community, be sure to join for all the latest updates delivered right to your inbox.

[Pramodh M]

Horray!!

So excited about all the releases. Most wanted!!

[Ollie Guan]

Will 8.0 have many changes in the UI? Is it more similar to the Cloud style?

Looking forward to sharing some screenshots.

[Dave Liao]

@Mel Policicchio - Looking forward to upcoming Jira and Confluence accessibility improvements - whether it's JSM, Jira Core, etc., it's all appreciated.

I noticed "Accessibility for Jira and Confluence" had both "SHIPPED" and "COMING SOON" lozenges next to the section, I found that a little confusing. 😅

Curious about potential future quality of life improvements in using on-premise and Cloud Jira and Confluence instances side-by-side. Can any Product Managers from the DC side comment on future features? 🙃

[Jeanne Howe]

So, back end updates to keep Atlassian on the latest platform versions/security updates and required-by-law accessibility updates, but no actual/real application UI bug fixes or feature updates.

Basically, you're pushing releases for the sole purpose of updating the release numbers and trying to convince DC clients that you are supporting them.

[Mel Policicchio]

Hey @Dave Liao that's a good question about the shared shipped/coming soon label. To clarify, the shipped content includes the recent updates to Jira Software that removed some critical issues for low-vision and keyboard-only users, including improvements to accessibility for buttons, links, and icons. This also includes recently shipped Jira Service Management fixes to resolve critical user interface accessibility issues related to the Insight Asset Management issue raised in their latest VPAT assessment.

The remaining content highlights upcoming features for Jira Software and Confluence. 

As to your question about using on-premise and Cloud Jira and Confluence instances side-by-side, I will track down a product manager to get an answer for you. 

Thanks for being part of the Data Center community!

[Mel Policicchio]

Hi @Dave Liao as promised, here is a community post that our PMs believe should answer your question about using on-premise and Cloud Jira and Confluence instances side-by-side. I hope this helps!