How are you dealing with server going away in 2024?

[Brant Schroeder]

I am interested in what steps you are taking to ensure that you are able to continue to use Atlassian products after 2024?  Or are you going to move away from them?  

With the announcement that server will no longer be supporting server in 2024 what types of planning, discussions and work are you doing now to prepare for this change.

[Stéphanie DeGuire]

I am with the Canadian federal government. We have an installation of Jira, Jira Service Desk, Confluence, Bamboo, Bitbucket. 

We also have Atlassian-owned add-ons like Team Calendars , Advanced Roadmaps and many other marketplace add-ons installed. 

We will need to do an options analysis to determine a way forward.

Our main decision factors:

• Impact on our current users and projects
• Costs
• Security
• Official Languages and Accessibility standards
• Configuration Flexibility
• User Management

Here are some of the questions we hope to be able to answer in the coming months:

• There is a "Enterprise Cloud" option. Would that meet our security needs? 
• How would user and license management work for Data Centre vs Cloud? 
• When are they going to have data centers in Canada for cloud?
• Which of our add-ons won't work for Data Center? Cloud?
• Will we be able to meet official languages in all scenarios?
• Will we be able to keep our current(and planned) integrations with other internal tools? (CI/CD for developers, MSTeams, ITPPM, Service Desk)
• What extra functionality is gained with Data Centre for each product?
• What would be the total $$ if we assume:
  • Data Centre with current licenses
  • Data Centre with reduced licenses (only those in use)
  • Cloud - Basic and Enterprise 

I sent the following questions to Atlassian: 

• If we have purchased and renewed “unlimited” Jira Server license in the past, can that be grandfathered into a Jira Data Center licenses that is unlimited at a discount price? Currently, the cost more than doubles, from 200 000$ USD to 495 000$
• For marketplace/add-ons, will this change the costing model? If the lowest number of licenses we can have on premise is 500, then some of these add-ons might become unaffordable for small teams. It would be great if add-ons were charged by numbers of projects/users actually using it rather than for the whole instance, but I could see this becoming an administrative nightmare.
• We have a team (<25) that work on high security projects and need their own instances on disconnected servers (SECRET environment in Government terms). They need Confluence and Jira. What would be their best option?
  • Related: If our organization purchases “unlimited” Data Center licenses for Jira and Confluence, would we be allowed to install more than one “production” instance?
  • Is Atlassian open to the idea of having a lower tier for Data Centre licenses? (ex: 100 users, or something < 10,000 USD)

[Jeff Reisman]

We're in a similar boat as Stephanie's smaller team. We currently use the suite of Atlassian products on a disconnected network with at most somewhere between 15-30 users, so most of our licenses are currently set at 50 users. The Server line was appealing since it let us use Enterprise-level tools with a price point that could adapt to how large our team was. 

Going forward I think Atlassian has essentially priced themselves out. I can't in good faith tell our program managers that Jira and Confluence alone are worth 30-40k/yr in cost when there's plenty of free or cheaper alternatives out there. Sure, they're not as good, but it's mind boggling to consider that we'd need to pay for an issue tracker and a wiki something approaching our yearly maintenance fee for a top-of-the-line Real-Time Operating System. The only two paths I see forward to keeping an Atlassian-focused development environment are:

• Atlassian drops the minimum user count for Data Center from 500 to something more reasonable such that we can better keep our costs in-check for a small team
• One of the higher-visibility and higher-budget dev teams using our systems decides to put more of their budget towards covering the gap to avoid having to deal with the pain of transitioning

In general this is also forcing me to reconsider how I even want to build-up my own company's development infrastructure as we win awards. Prior to this announcement I would've not hesitated at all to say we'd go with Atlassian. Now my expectation is that Atlassian has priced themselves out of being used for that too. Since these awards will generally require CUI/ITAR compliance, I could've previously just gone with AWS GovCloud to host a low-user Server instance, whereas now Atlassian (since they've priced Data Center too high for a small team) would mandate I go towards the Enterprise Cloud route for that at what I'm sure is a high cost still.

So honestly I think the main actions I have going forward are to reach out to Atlassian to ask about pricing for Cloud Enterprise that supports CUI/ITAR compliance, and then to also research alternatives to the Atlassian stack.