Architecting your Atlassian environment for scale

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Hi community! I am Raymond Tang, a Principal Product Manager focusing on scaling our cloud offering for enterprise.

Over the years you’ve heard us talk about how a migration to Atlassian Cloud is an opportunity to transform how you work by unlocking new capabilities that reduce your time-to-value and increase team productivity. However, you are also presented with another opportunity - the flexibility to scale your environment around the needs and structure of your organization.

This is done using two complimentary scaling options:

🚦 Single Instance - Vertical Vertical scaling is all about increasing the amount of data, such as pages, issues, or users, that are on a single product instance. This looks like having all of your teams on a single (consolidated) instance of your Atlassian products.

🚥 Multiple Instances - Horizontal Horizontal scaling is all about increasing the number of unique product instances, that each have their own set of users and data. This looks like having multiple decentralized instances (multi-instance) of your Atlassian products to support individual teams or business units.

We know that your organization is dynamic, and that is why we provide these two scaling options to help your business evolve with agility. Many enterprises leverage the unique benefits of both scaling options, using single instance for consolidation and multiple instances when isolation is required. We encourage you to keep this in mind as you plan or build your environment.

With our Cloud Enterprise Edition, Atlassian Administration centralizes your key administrative tasks, helping admins remain efficient and effective.

To help better articulate the different scaling options and some of their benefits, I have laid out some common use cases below.

Single instance customer use case examples

• Efficient collaboration: With everyone working on the same platform, collaboration across different teams or departments is more efficient. Information sharing and cross-functional projects are easier to facilitate, ultimately breaking down silos within the organization.

• Centralized administration and governance: Managing your users and data on only one instance removes the need to manage and oversee administering multiple instances. This often reduces the administrative workload, making it more manageable and less time-consuming.

• Standardized process and user-experience: A single instance ensures that all of your users interact with the same interface, workflows, and processes. This consistency can improve your user experience, making it easier for teams to complete work and for new members to get up to speed.

Pro Tip: Maintain good data hygiene. We recently released Site Optimizer for Jira Software Cloud Enterprise to help you maintain a healthy data shape and efficiently declutter your workspaces.

Multi-instance customer use case examples

• Separate lines of business (LOBs): You can align your instances to your business lines, product lines, or geos to assist in reporting or management. Another common example is conglomerates often separate their subsidiaries or acquisitions from their primary corporate instance.

• Meet security and compliance requirements: You can use multiple instances to meet stringent security and compliance demands. This may look like highly sensitive and compartmentalized intellectual property (IP) that can only be accessed by a designated group of users, or compliance with data residency regulations.

Atlassian Cloud Enterprise plans enable you to use multiple instances to horizontally scale your organization with up to 150 sites associated with your Atlassian organization. This provides you with additional flexibility to meet your unique needs and demands.

By no means is the above a comprehensive list of use-cases or benefits but rather some examples of how and what we see many of you do.

Migrating to Atlassian Cloud

If you are considering migrating to Atlassian Cloud, we are here to help. Here are two best practices to help you make a smooth transition:

1. Scalability Assessments: It’s important that we understand your current data shape and how it will perform in cloud, which we do through our scalability assessments. Through our migration assistants, we’ll collect your metadata to understand your current usage patterns. We’ll walk you through the results of the assessment to discuss the health of your data shape and opportunities for how to better manage the complexity.

2. Cloud Blueprint: We run a workshop with you to map your current footprint to your desired end-state in cloud to help you determine what the optimal product setup is for your organization’s needs. To learn more, download the Cloud Blueprint.

For people who are already on cloud, you can run the cloud blueprint exercise with your team to determine the right model. From there, you can do a cloud-to-cloud migration.

As we continue to develop our single and multi-instance scaling abilities, we would love to understand how each of these options meets your specific needs and what you desire going forward. Please feel free to leave suggestions, comments, or questions below.

[Dave Liao]

@Raymond Tang - This is a good highlight! Thanks for sharing.

The linked Cloud Blueprint is a solid exercise for any team considering moving to the Cloud - even if no, there are questions in the PDF folks should periodically ask themselves. In particular:

• Where are we successful?
• What processes can be improved?

… like in a retrospective, but not tied to a sprint. 😉 

[Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM]

Thanks, @Raymond Tang very informative article.