The future of Data Center [Webinar FAQ]

[#1]

Hi Atlassian Community!

We recently hosted a webinar on The Future of Data Center that highlights what we’ve shipped in the last year and what our roadmap looks like for the upcoming year. Over the course of the three sessions (US, APAC, and EMEA) we received tons of questions, questions that we’ve answered and wanted to share with our broader community:

General

• How often are LTS releases released? We tend to have one Long Term Support release a year for every product. The latest LTS release per product is as follows:

  • Jira Software 8.13

  • Confluence 7.4

  • Jira Service Desk 4.13

  • Bitbucket 7.6

• Will Jira Software Data Center be supported after 2024? Yes, we have no plans to stop supporting any Data Center products.
• Which products does the end of sale and support apply to?
  • Jira Software Server
  • Jira Core Server
  • Jira Service Management Server (formerly known as Jira Service Desk Server)
  • Confluence Server
  • Bitbucket Server
  • Crowd Server
  • Bamboo Server

  • Exceptions:

    • You will still be able to purchase new licenses for Fisheye and Crucible, which remain in basic maintenance mode.

    • We plan to make Bamboo Data Center available in the near future. As details emerge, we will notify current Bamboo Server customers and continually update this FAQ. Until further notice, you will still be able to purchase new licenses for Bamboo Server.

• In order to switch to Data Center, we would have to invest a lot of effort. Therefore my question: Is Data Center here to stay, or will Data Center be abandoned as well midterm? We are committed to investing in Data Center for the long term, and we hope that the velocity with which we are shipping new features and functionality to Data Center and the fact that we are launching a brand new Data Center product, Bamboo Data Center, reassures you of this commitment. Atlassian will continue to offer and invest significantly in Data Center as our on-prem offering because we understand that it is a critical offering for many of our customers with strict business requirements or regulations and it is a critical path for customers to use as a stepping stone to cloud via AWS for example. We intend to deliver a world-class experience for all of our customers regardless of how they deploy our products.

Pricing

• Are Data Center licenses perpetual? For example, if I don't extend support for Data Center, am I still able to access & use it after the expiration date? No, our Data Center products are based on annual subscriptions. To continue using your Data Center subscription after your annual subscription expires, you must renew your subscription. To learn more about Data Center Pricing & Licensing, check out our FAQ.
• If we purchased Advanced Roadmaps & Insight separately, what happens to the licenses/pre-paid credits if we upgrade to Data Center? Server customers with existing app licenses can continue to renew support and maintenance for these apps until the end of support date.
• Are we going to offer lower user tiers of Data Center? At this time, we aren’t offering lower user tiers for our Data Center products. However, we are taking feedback from customers, such as yourself, to find better ways to support organizations that may be on a multi-phase journey to the cloud.
• Will the education and community licenses be available for Data Center? Special discounted pricing is available for qualified Academic institutions. As for Community Data Center subscriptions, they will be available for free for those of you who can't move to cloud before the end of support.

Migrations

• When you migrate to Data Center in a non-clustered architecture (ie on a single node), can you continue to run your server instance? If you are planning on migrating to Data Center in a non-clustered architecture, we recommend that you test it in your staging environment first. This will allow you to keep your teams running on your server products while you test. It’s worth noting that this type of migration only requires a license upgrade, so you aren’t changing the infrastructure or experience. You’re just unlocking new capabilities that previously weren’t available to you.

  You can find more details on how to migrate to Data Center in a non-clustered architecture in the Data Center migration center

• Is there any sort of guide of whether it makes sense to go to Data Center or cloud for a customer? Yes, we have a number of resources available that can help you identify whether cloud or Data Center is a better fit for your organization. We recommend starting by evaluating our cloud solutions and roadmap to assess if that deployment option is the right fit for your organization. We also offer a cloud assessment tool that can help determine which deployment option meets the regulatory and compliance requirements of your organization. Additionally, we've built two migration centers - one for cloud and one for Data Center. Each provides tools and resources that are also helpful in deciding which option is right for your organization. 
• What is your recommendation for installations that are too small to be migrated to a Data Center license but cannot move to the cloud because of regulations and GDPR compliance? We know that organizations have different compliance requirements that they need to meet and we are continuing to invest in these areas in our cloud products. We will continue to support our server products for the next 3 years. During this time, we recommend keeping an eye on the roadmap to determine when you can make the move. Our roadmaps are kept up-to-date, so you see when your requirements will be implemented in cloud. We have also heard feedback from customers that they are interested in lower user tiers for Data Center and are evaluating options for how to best meet that need.

For customers interested in learning more about the process of migration and/or how to navigate the server end of sale, we recommend attending our webinar.

Performance, scale, and availability

• We have read that we might scale Jira Data Center beyond five nodes with doc-based replication, but it may consume twice the network bandwidth. Any further insights on that? Curious about how that affects shared home on a NAS drive. We’re confident that this won’t impact your shared home. We've performed tests on Jira running on 8 nodes with a high user traffic and the network bandwidth between nodes was still on a manageable level with sufficient capacity to still be increased. However, we advise you to perform a test in your sandbox environment to see how your particular network set up will handle a similar scenario.
• When you say custom field customization, is it like we will have schemas for custom fields like Priority field schema was introduced recently? We’re referring to more of a back end tuning that we’ve introduced to reduce the impact of custom fields on performance and indexing time. We’ve optimized the implementation so that unneeded data isn’t stored in the Lucene index anymore. Because of these changes, an index can shrink - in some cases even 50% - and the time it takes to index will go down too.

Infrastructure and operations

• So when we say migrating to Data Center, just updating the license is enough and no more changes needs to be done at the setup level? That’s correct. Data Center can be deployed in two architectures: clustered or non-clustered (ie single node). When you choose to deploy in a non-clustered architecture, you just need to update the license key.

  Here’s a video library that shows you what that process looks like in product.

User management

• How are personal access tokens more secure? Personal Access Tokens has built-in token expiry, which improves security as it enforces token rotation. Application links use the legacy OAuth 1.0 protocol which is considered not as secure for modern applications. Our team is also working on adding OAuth 2.0 support which is the industry-standard authorization mechanism for modern applications.

  What’s more, PATs gives end-users the ability to generate tokens for themselves without admins having to configure the link which saves time, and with DC instances, it also allows admins to revoke users tokens adding more security.

Apps and extensibility

• If server instances are migrated to Data Center, how will it affect the installed plugins and their license management? When moving from server to Data Center, you’ll need to move to Data Center approved app subscriptions if a Data Center app is available. 

  If there is no Data Center version available, you can continue to use the server version of the app, though it comes with some risk as the app has not received an architecture review or been performance tested to ensure it can scale in a Data Center environment.

  If a Data Center version becomes available, you will then need to purchase a Data Center subscription in order to keep using it.

• How does the transition to the Data Center features work in Feb? If you already have it installed and co-termed to the 2nd February, do we need to do anything at the transition date such as upgrading? If you already use these apps, you’ll no longer have to renew your subscription after February 2, 2021 PT. However, please note you will need to use the methods outlined below to unlock the functionality before your existing app license expires.

  You’ll need to either upgrade to a Data Center product version with the app included, or install a compatible version of the app at no cost. The apps will not require a license, and functionality will unlock when the app starts on a compatible Data Center subscription.

  • Advanced Roadmaps will be available in Jira Software Data Center 8.15+

  • Team Calendars and Analytics will be available in Confluence Data Center 7.11+

  • Insight Asset Management will be available in Jira Service Management 4.15+

    • Insight Discovery will be available as an app at no cost

Jira Service Management

• How different is Jira Service Desk compared to JSM? Is it just re-branding or are you adding any new functionalities? Jira Service Management, the next generation of Jira Service Desk - an ITSM solution built to help IT operations and development teams collaborate at high velocity.

  In addition to the existing functionality available in Jira Service Desk, we’re adding new capabilities, such as asset and change management. This page provides an overview of some of the new features.

• When we upgrade to JSM from Jira Service Desk, will everything still work the same in regard to existing configurations and workflows? Yes, everything will still work the same. The difference is you will have access to new capabilities that will help your IT and development teams collaborate better at scale.
• Will Insight from Mindville still be available as a standalone app for use with Jira Software Data Center? Yes, Mindville Insight will still be available as an app through the Atlassian Marketplace till 2nd Feb 2023. After that date, JSW DC customers will have to buy JSM DC to get Insight.
• Will Jira Service Management DC have the same features and integrations level with Opsgenie than the Jira Service Management Cloud version? Yes, Yes, Jira Service Management Data Center will have most of the features and integrations as cloud. The only difference is you will need a separate purchase of Opsgenie.
• When will Insight asset management be available in Jira Service Management? Will it be possible to use Insight fields in Jira Software in case we have Jira Service Management licenses? Insight (asset & configuration management) will soon be available out of the box for Jira Service Management Data Center customers.

  It’s possible to use Insight fields in Jira Software as long as you also have Jira Software licenses, in addition to Jira Service Management licenses. If you only have Jira Service Management licenses, you will only be able to use the Insight field with Jira Service Management projects/issues.

Stay across the latest with What’s new? Updates related to the server end of sale and support – a quick recap of the updates, resources, and answers that we're prioritizing in response to listening to your feedback.

[Nicolas Seronvalle]

Thank you very much for the webinar and for your answers ! Always great to know we can share feedbacks and concerns that will be taken into consideration. 

Have a good day

[Steve Morris]

Will the Insight Discovery application also be included in my Data Center Subscription once Insight is included on 2/2/2021?  

Thanks

[Maggie]

@Steve Morris - Yes, as of February 2, 2021, Insight Discovery will be included in your Jira Service Management subscription. If you want more details on this, please visit our FAQs. Thanks again and let us know if you have any other questions!

[Alex Janes]

Atlassian Team, thank you for posting this, This helps reassure me that Data Center is here to stay.

[Alex Janes]

Just to follow up, I am actually seeing new items appearing in the Jira Data Center roadmap. That makes me feel a lot more confident that you will continue to support Data Center products for the foreseeable future. :)