Jira Server Admins future after 15th Feb 2024 (Discussion Topic)

[Sridhar Gandla]

Kindly note that,  this is discussion Topic only... Not to discourage anyone who is currently using  Jira Server products. 

Considering, Atlassian ending support of Server support  after February 15, 2024 -What are the chances & career options for existing  Jira Admin  & Atlassian Tools supporting staff existing roles ?   

[Kalin U]

Probably, you think that after much of the heavy lifting gets on the cloud infrastructure (installation, running, updating instance and apps, backing up), the responsibilities and the workload of a Jira admin would diminish.

I started my current role for cloud-only products, and there is still a great lot to do. The focus is on restructuring Jira, Confluence and whatever Atlassian products are in place to serve my organizations much better, plus integrating them with other tool sets from various vendors (e.g. Microsoft, Salesforce and many others). There are many setups and configurations, testing, documentation and user training that go that route.

It has been a very interesting journey so far, I can tell.

[Sridhar Gandla]

I believe, some Data Center/ Server Jira Admin Job responsibilities may get reduce due to Cloud... Focus may with to training and also Atlassian eco system other Tools; Also, there could be few less Job positions for the Admins.. 

[Kalin U]

I think that the responsibilities will not become fewer, instead they will change. The focus will be on translating business requirements into configurations and integrations. It is just a different world.

[John Price]

There's still Data Center for now, although I expect Atlassian to keep pushing Cloud, and I think it's generally the best option for new customers.  My team manages Server, Data Center, and Cloud (large org), and as we move to Cloud the desired team skillset goes away from Linux, AWS, database, and SRE skills and towards Jira and Confluence best practices.  In my own team I'm finding that it's not an easy transition, but it's needed.  

We should all focus on understanding the use cases for Jira users.  Jira admins should have basic Agile certifications and knowledge, portfolio planning experience, and software development process understanding, as well as pro/con knowledge of direct competitors like Azure DevOps or the zillions of more recent Jira lookalikes such as Monday.com.