Start Your Upgrade: Bitbucket Data Center 9.4 LTS is Now Available!

[#1]

Hello Community! 👋

We’re excited to announce that Bitbucket 9.4 is now live as the latest Bitbucket Data Center Long Term Support (LTS) release!

Why choose a Long Term Support release?

Upgrading to a Long Term Support release provides you with continued access to critical security, stability, data integrity and performance fixes for the full two years before this version reaches its end of life. It enables you to move quickly when a high-impact bug fix, or security fix is ported over and released for upgrading.

What’s New in Bitbucket 9.4 LTS?

Developer and Admin Experience

• Multiline Suggestions and Comments: With multiline suggestions and comments, developers can now provide detailed feedback in code review across multiple lines, ensuring clarity and precision in your communication.

• Rolling Upgrades for Mirror Farms: Simplify maintenance and minimize downtime with seamless upgrades, keeping your systems running smoothly.

• Reviewer Groups as Code Owners: Streamline code reviews by automatically assigning the right reviewers, enhancing efficiency and code quality.

• Filter Out Merge Commits: Simplify your commit history view by unchecking the new "Show merge commits" box. This feature allows end users and admins to focus solely on the team's commits, making it easier to track changes and streamline code reviews.

Security and Compliance

• Two-Step Verification: Fortify account security with an additional layer of protection, safeguarding your data and systems.

• Enhanced Database Security: Protect sensitive information with improved security measures for database-stored secrets, ensuring compliance with industry standards.

• Secure Administrator Sessions: Enhance compliance with security policies by securing admin sessions with websudo.

• Securing the bitbucket.properties File: Automatically secure sensitive properties in the bitbucket.properties file, enhancing the protection of configuration data.

• User Directory Password Encryption: Encrypt plaintext external user directory passwords, like LDAP, using AES. Ensure encryption keys in the shared home directory are part of your backup strategy.

• Branch Creation Permissions: Restrict branch creation to authorized users, applying permissions to specific patterns or models. Unauthorized attempts result in an error, ensuring secure and controlled branch management.

Performance and Scaling

• Support for Multiple Availability Zones: Increase resilience and reduce latency by distributing Bitbucket Mesh across multiple zones, ensuring optimal performance.

• Storing Git LFS Objects in S3: Optimize storage and retrieval of large files with seamless Amazon S3 integration, enhancing your workflow efficiency.

• Atlassian Data Center Platform 7: Improves the quality of our response to security changes with reduced disruption and breaking changes for Atlassian Marketplace apps.

Monitoring, Insights, and Troubleshooting

• Security Monitoring and Alerts: Stay ahead of potential threats with real-time monitoring and alerting capabilities, ensuring your systems are secure and reliable.

Plan ahead for Bitbucket 8.9 LTS support EOL

For customers currently on Bitbucket version 8.9, a quick reminder that the support end of life (EOL) date set for that version will be 12 April 2025.  Upgrading to Bitbucket Data Center 9.4 LTS is a great chance to get all the latest features and enhancements whilst ensuring the security and performance of your product.

Ready to Upgrade?

Ensure your systems are secure and efficient by upgrading to Bitbucket 9.4 LTS today! For more details, visit our Bitbucket Data Center 9.4 release notes.

Thanks for being part of our community and we hope you enjoy Bitbucket 9.4 LTS!

Bitbucket Data Center Team

[Kent Rogers]

When will Bitbucket 9.4 be added to the Long Term Support releases page (https://confluence.atlassian.com/enterprise/atlassian-enterprise-releases-948227420.html)?

[Elias Brattli Sørensen - Kantega SSO]

Thank you for this announcement @Vicky Hu . I'd like to highlight an important detail that isn't visible in this announcement, release notes or upgrade notes for Bitbucket 9.4 LTS. When upgrading to 9.4, you will also upgrade your system to Platform 7, which is a major rewrite of the core system architecture and the interfaces with apps/plugins that was introduced in version 9.0. Everyone upgrading should take a good look at the 9.0 release notes.

I recommend testing version 9.4 with all production-relevant apps in a dev environment to reduce the risk of unexpected production outages. If you have internally written plugins, they will also be affected by the Platform 7 changes. We app vendors have put down a lot of testing efforts to achieve compatibility with this new release. However, even if an app is marked as "compatible", the risk of unexpected issues is a lot higher that normal for a major version upgrade due to the many fundamental changes in Platform 7.



Br,
Elias
Kantega SSO

[Ian Benson]

Anyone else noticed that we have not had a full 2 years between  8.19 LTS and this release.  Not only have we been deprived of 4 months, it also aligns the future releases with that of Confluence LTS, both being in December.  If you are solely responsible for maintaining multiple Atlassian apps, having potentially 2 platform level upgrades to investigate, test and deploy at the same time (necessary as support on previous versions expires at the time) could provide for a major headache.