Managing Government Instances at Scale

[#1]

Hi, I am Ken Urban, Public Sector Technology Director here at Atlassian. Prior to working at Atlassian I served for a decade within the U.S. Intelligence community building large scale Hadoop systems and designing and managing one of the largest Atlassian stacks in operation. Between the two efforts I helped to fundamentally alter how software development was conducted at the agency and influenced many of my peers to adopt similar methodologies.

I know managing large-scale instances whether that is Atlassian, Hadoop or Kubernetes can be challenging. Ordinary maintenance can become more and more difficult as your instance grows, as it’s no longer possible to do maintenance like restarting or locking to rebuild the index. When working at scale, records management grows exponentially and it is not uncommon to quickly grow into hundreds of thousands of records and multiple different disposition schedules to track. While this growth can be exciting it can also bring up new challenges, which if not managed correctly can be exhausting.

Sound familiar? As someone who has been there, I can empathize and that’s why I wrote the Managing Large Scale Instances blog and why @Jim Dodson and I did this webinar: How to Manage Large Atlassian Instances in Gov Agencies. However, I know that is just the beginning. There are so many more topics, tips, and tricks that we could possibly fit into a single article or webinar. I know many of you, some of which I worked with while in government, are there right now. Some of you might just be exploring how to deal with this sudden increase in scale.

So for those of you who are there, or have been there, what tips/tricks would you share to help your fellow government employees out? What lessons learned can you share? What other topics would you be interested in hearing about?

[M Amine]

Thank you @Ken Urban

Just beginning our Journey on this so don't have much to share for now. 

Will keep you posted.