What’s new and what’s ahead for Data Center: June 2022

[#1]

Hi there, Data Center community! I’m Mel, part of the Data Center marketing team here at Atlassian. Today is the first of our new quarterly updates for our Data Center community, keeping all of you apprised of what has shipped and what’s ahead for Data Center products. These updates won’t be exhaustive but will offer a high-level summary of both platform and product-level updates. For more insight into our upcoming releases, please visit the Data Center roadmap.

Understanding the future of Data Center

We know that Atlassian has not been shy about sharing our cloud-focused investment, and some of you have shared concerns about what that means for the future of Data Center products. We are keenly aware that Data Center is still mission-critical for many users. As such, we want you to know that we’re committed to continuing to support you on your journey with Atlassian whether you are currently in the process of a cloud migration or choose to remain self-managed for the foreseeable future.

To be clear, we have no plans to end of life or end of support for our Data Center offering.

Data Center remains an integral component of Atlassian’s offerings to ensure our software continues to meet the unique needs and requirements of all of your organizations. We are shaping Data Center’s future investment strategy to meet what you have told us are your most critical needs:

• Performance and scale

• Security and compliance

• Infrastructure and operation

In sharpening our focus we believe that we can best meet your business and mission-critical needs today while being able to evolve and change with you as your needs possibly shift in the future. Data Center will continue delivering a full enterprise-grade platform with all the features and capabilities you have come to rely on and love. Read our full future of Data Center statement from Gosia Kowalska, Head of Product for Data Center.

Platform and cross-product updates

Accessibility

To ensure we continue to meet your organization’s compliance needs, we’ve furthered our accessibility investment and continue to align with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA. To that end, one of our first steps was to refresh the VPAT documents for our products to reflect recent improvements. You can view and learn more about those updates at atlassian.com/accessibility.

The Jira Service Management team is currently working on uplifting the accessibility standards of Insight Asset Management. This includes keyboard and screen reader features, such as updates to drag and drop for greater accessibility. Confluence users can also look forward to coming accessibility improvements such as sidebar navigation and profile page updates for screen reader users.

Application tunnels

Application Tunnels provide a secure pathway between Atlassian Cloud and Data Center instances beyond the firewall. Customers can use this pathway to integrate Atlassian products through Application Links that would otherwise require allowing incoming connections on the firewall. Thanks to tunneling, you can securely exchange data and functionalities between products without exposing the network to the outside world. Read more about application tunnels.

Guardrails and safeguards

Understanding how much data your instance can effectively manage helps keep your software performant as you scale. To guide your understanding while helping you manage your growing instances, we will soon release guardrails for Jira Software and later for Confluence. Guardrails are documentation and strategic recommendations designed to help you avoid a tipping point at which your instance may start to experience performance impacts.

Some of our upcoming product releases will also include safeguard features to help you manage those tipping points in your software. For example, Jira Software will soon feature safeguards for comments, which ensure that the number of comments on an issue does not slow the page load. We also have announced improvements to Jira indexing to help alleviate pressure on your indexing queues. Learn more about Jira Indexing Safeguards.

Product updates

Below includes highlights from a variety of different product-specific updates, ranging from platform releases to LTS release announcements.

Jira Software and Jira Service Management

We are building towards our next Jira platform release, Jira Software 9.0 and Jira Service Management 5.0. This platform release will be focused on improvements to security, performance, and automation capabilities. To help teams work more efficiently and effectively, Automation for Jira (A4J) will be 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 will become 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 and Jira Service Management release EAP.

Confluence

Confluence’s next Long Term Support release (LTS) was announced as 7.19, targeting a release in CY22Q3. Learn more about Confluence 7.19 or learn more about how Long Term Support releases help keep your organization secure.

Bitbucket

Last month we released Bitbucket 8.0, addressing key performance issues for Bitbucket users. We know some of you experienced performance degradation after upgrading from a single-node Server to a multi-node Bitbucket Data Center instance. Bitbucket Mesh, a key component of the 8.0 platform release, solves this through distributed Git storage for increased performance and high availability of repositories. Bitbucket 8.0 also introduced repository archiving, allowing users to remove archived repositories from lists and search results while keeping them available in read-only mode. To learn about Bitbucket 8.0 in more detail, read the Bitbucket 8.0 release community post.

Bamboo

In April, we released Bamboo 8.2, enhancing both performance and the end-user experience. This release brought rate-limiting, a performance-boosting feature you’ve enjoyed across other Data Center products, to Bamboo. To learn more about how rate-limiting helps optimize stability and improve performance, as well as other 8.2 capabilities, including support for pull requests from forked repositories, read the Bamboo 8.2 release notes.

Crowd

Crowd 5.0 was recently released. As a platform release, this allows for multiple backward-incompatible or “breaking” changes that lay the foundation for continuous improvement in future releases. Crowd 5.0 allows users to enable HTML rendering for email notifications coming from Crowd, allowing you to tailor your emails according to your company’s brand. Learn more about how the latest Crowd update helps you better communicate with your team in the Crowd 5.0 release notes.

Thanks for reading 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.

[Troy Chaplin]

I'm just going to address the elephant in the room right away. Will data center continue to see new features after 9.0 is released or is the plan moving forward to only boost the functionality of cloud while simply maintaining the 3 areas mentioned for DC?

[Troy Chaplin]

In regards to maintaining DC for security purposes, can you please why this issue relating to Log4j still does not have an assignee? https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-62838

Plenty of people asking about it as they are being asked about it by security teams in their own organization.

[Jeanne Howe]

Of the nearly 9000 issues in the support back log - https://jira.atlassian.com/issues/?filter=98704  - can you identify these issues by category - 

• Performance and scale

• Security and compliance

• Infrastructure and operation

This will inform us of what we can expect to see in regard to Bug fixes and Feature development 

[Mel Policicchio]

Hi @Troy Chaplin, yes Jira and other Data Center products will continue to receive investment including additional capabilities and features in the primary areas as well as additional investments outside those areas. We will continue to share updates on an ongoing basis about our future roadmap and investments.

To answer your second question, we’re aware that most of the products on the market have updated their Log4J lib to 2.17.x version and we will be doing the same so please continue watching https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-62838 for updates on timelines (expect an update soon).

Additionally, as an FYI do we maintain the private fork of Log4J 1.2.7 and make sure it is not vulnerable by patching it. Since log4j upgrade is a breaking change and not a simple task, thus we are planning its release carefully.

Thanks!

[Troy Chaplin]

@Mel Policicchio at this point I'll believe it when I see it. The DC road map pales in comparison to the one for cloud, and the fact that 3 of your people setup an AMA then disappeared when faced with a mildly tough question left me with so many doubts about the future of DC, and has made me rethink the direction of my career. I don't feel confident in anything long term as far as DC goes.

[Mel Policicchio]

Hey @Jeanne Howe, thanks for this suggestion. We don’t currently have filters set up for those criteria, but I will pass this feedback on to our product teams or see if there are alternative ways to give you better clarity into what's on our roadmap and the area. Thanks!

[Jeanne Howe]

Since Atlassian is claiming DC isn't going anywhere, how about getting rid of all the "references" to cloud in the DC documentation.

Documentation, Knowledge base, Training, Trouble shooting. Anywhere I go for Dc information, I am bombarded with cloud information.

[Troy Chaplin]

@Jeanne Howe good luck with that. I'd also like to see the Cloud Migration plugin not be forced on DC customers. I gave up disabling and uninstalling it as it just gets put back on during the next upgrade. Pretty heavy handed with the cloud stuff.

[Jeanne Howe]

@Mel Policicchio 

You responded to my June 3rd comment but missed the point:

While it would be good to categorize the backlog, we want to know NOW what issues we can expect to see Atlassian working on. A question NO ONE has answered for us. Instead you all reference back to Data Center Roadmap which, quite frankly, tells us nothing

Atlassian claims to have done the research and was supposedly told these are the areas their customers want to focus. If you truly have done the research, you will be able to answer the following:

Who participated in this research? (this question has been asked several times by several commenter with Atlassian avoiding the answer)

What items within the Data Center Support open backlogs fall into these categories.

Jira Software DC 

Jira DC 

[Ollie Guan]

That's great, but there are a lot of new features in Cloud that we desperately need too.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-articles/What-s-New-in-Confluence-Cloud-June-2022-Edition/ba-p/2055892

[Albert Lukan]

@Mel Policicchio, here's an example of an item people actually want: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-54271

You can see it on the first page if you sort Confluence Data Center open issues by Votes:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-54271?filter=98691&jql=project%20%3D%20CONFSERVER%20AND%20resolution%20%3D%20Unresolved%20ORDER%20BY%20Votes

I know party line is that your customers are only asking for updates related to "Performance and scale, Security and compliance, and Infrastructure and operation", but you literally have an enhancement voting system in place to track what kind of enhancements your customers really want.