An Interview with Atlassian's Harsh Jawharkar - thejiraguy.com X-Post

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((Originally posted on 11/18/2020 at http://thejiraguy.com/2020/11/18/an-interview-with-atlassians-harsh-jawharkar/))

After I published the "So Long, Server" post, Atlassian reached out to me, thanking me for my article and asking how they could help out. At the same time, I was still getting many questions from you, my dear readers. So, why not ask for an interview and forward your questions? That's exactly what I asked for, and I'm happy Atlassian accepted! Today I'm fortunate to meet and interview Harsh Jawharkar from Atlassian's Enterprise and Platform marketing team, who was gracious enough to answer questions I gathered from everyone on social media! So, let's get into it:

[TJG] Thank you for agreeing to answer my questions. I have, of course, given my thoughts around why Atlassian would choose to sunset their Server products now, but that will always be speculative at best. Can you explain directly to the readers why Atlassian is making this move, and why now was the time to do so?

[HJ] We are making this move in response to changing customer demands since the vast majority of our customers are choosing cloud offerings to power their organizations. 

Because of this, we started designing for a cloud-first future years ago, so we could deliver on the promise that we will run our software better than anyone else. As we assessed our progress towards that vision and as customers demanded more from our cloud products, we realized we needed to sharpen our focus. Dividing our resources between server, Data Center, and Cloud hindered our ability to innovate faster. By simplifying our on-premises offerings and focusing our resources, we can deliver more innovation faster.

To the point of why now - change often feels difficult, and there's rarely a perfect time for it. At Atlassian, we pride ourselves on making hard decisions that can be painful in the short-term when we are confident that it will lead to long-term, sustainable success for our customers. By making this decision now and communicating openly while offering three years of support, we give our customers time and clarity so they can continue to plan for their long-term success. 

[TJG] Some people are worried that Atlassian wishes to become a Cloud-Only company. Therefore, these customers are reluctant to build on Data Center for fear it will eventually have an End-of-Life. What can you say to these people to calm their fears?

[HJ] We are committed to investing in Data Center for the long term, and we hope that the velocity with which we are shipping new features and functionality to Data Center - and the fact that we are launching a brand new Data Center product, Bamboo Data Center - reassures you of this commitment. Atlassian will continue to offer and invest significantly in Data Center because we understand that it is a critical offering for many of our customers with strict business requirements or regulations. We intend to deliver a world-class experience for all of our customers regardless of how they deploy our products.

Over the past year, we've significantly invested in our Data Center offerings, ramping up the delivery of new enterprise-grade features like support for CDN, rate limiting, advanced auditing, and more. We also recently announced that we're including some of our most powerful Atlassian apps and new features with our Data Center subscriptions to help you meet your need for better collaboration and increased insights.

• Jira Software Data Center: Advanced Roadmaps (formerly Portfolio for Jira)
• Confluence Data Center: Team Calendars for Confluence, Analytics for Confluence
• Jira Service Desk Data Center: Insight - Asset Management, Insight Discovery

To learn more about what's available in Data Center or what's coming in the future, customers can also check out our Data Center roadmap: https://www.atlassian.com/roadmap/data-center 

[TJG] Apps have been in contention on Cloud since its inception. What steps is Atlassian taking to allow Custom App Development and deployment things without involving a third-party hosting service?

[HJ] Our new cloud development platform, Forge, which is currently in beta and on track to being publicly available soon, was designed to address just this. Forge empowers developers to easily build and run enterprise-ready cloud apps that integrate with Atlassian products, leveraging the investments we've made to our cloud platform.

With Forge, developers can host their apps on Atlassian cloud infrastructure, which minimizes the time, cost, and effort spent on managing infrastructure, increases admin transparency and mitigates concerns about mishandling sensitive user data. Developers can build and customize new apps quickly with the Forge UI kit, a declarative language for defining user experiences. Forge also offers built-in compliance and Custom UI, giving developers complete control over the framework used while ensuring a high level of trust for scripts running in the app. 

Forge also comes with an intuitive command-line interface (CLI) tool, which offers a centralized place for app management and provides automatically provisioned environments to build, test, and deploy apps. When you use Forge, you also have the option to use continuous delivery powered by Bitbucket Pipelines and Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) to write single functions, which means less time spent writing code and a lower barrier-to-entry for anyone wanting to write apps and integrations for Atlassian products.

[TJG] There is a lot of invaluable information on Server Products both in the Atlassian Knowledge Base and the Atlassian Community. However, some of this information applies to Data Center as well. What is Atlassian's plan for these treasure troves of knowledge and help?

[HJ] We intend to keep and continuously improve resources available in the Atlassian Knowledge Base and Atlassian Community to help our customers get the most out of our products. Any server-specific resources in the Atlassian Knowledge Base and Atlassian Community will remain available at least for the next three years. Our Support Team regularly reviews this material in an effort to keep them up-to-date, which means you can expect us to be updating documentation to match our product offerings. For example, we will make updates to make it clear to customers when a post is applicable to both Server and Data Center. Given the volume of existing content, it will take us time to get the documentation up-to-date. We hope our customers continue to rely on the Atlassian Knowledge Base and Atlassian Community as a treasure trove of knowledge and help for all of our products. 

We are also updating our Atlassian University resources and training modules to ensure that any materials originally created for our server products that are applicable to Data Center are kept up to date.

[TJG] Many small companies are caught in a tough place by this announcement. Due to regulations, they cannot move to Cloud, but their size makes Data Center fiscally untenable. What is being done between now and February 2024 to add the security and certifications necessary to allow customers to move Jira Cloud without running afoul of regulations.

[HJ] First, to clarify, our cloud products have obtained industry-accepted certifications and comply with current industry standards and regulations, so you can feel confident that your company and customer data remain secure and compliant. We run our security program in compliance with a range of well-known industry standards. We appreciate that these attestations matter, as they provide independent assurance to our customers that we are on the right track. SOC2, ISO27001, ISO27018, PCI DSS, and CSA STAR are standards that we certify against at the moment. Atlassian has also completed a comprehensive GDPR compliance program, and we offer a Data Processing Addendum for customers. More details about these programs are available on our Compliance page.

Trello is our first cloud product to have received FedRAMP certification, and Jira Software Cloud and Confluence Cloud are currently under evaluation. We're also working on Healthcare (HIPAA) and Financial Services Industry (BaFin, APRA, US) compliance for Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Confluence Cloud. Our cloud platform and services roadmap also highlights a snapshot of the capabilities we feature today, along with a glimpse of what's to come between now and February 2024. 

[TJG] For these same customers, is there a plan to allow smaller Data Centers to accommodate these people if they cannot move to Cloud.

[HJ] We realize this is a big shift, and we're continuously gathering feedback from our customers. You can see here some of the ways we're already responding to this feedback, and we will continue to communicate openly with our customers. One option for smaller server customers who cannot move to Cloud is to deploy Data Center products in a non-clustered environment, so they can keep their existing infrastructure and simply change their license key. When it comes to other ways we can facilitate a smooth transition for smaller customers moving to Data Center, we're in active listening mode and want to make sure we make well-informed decisions that work for all our customers in the long run.

[TJG] Small teams who are moving from a smaller Server Tier under maintenance to a minimum 500 user Data Center Tier will have a dramatic increase in price - even with the incentives in place. Has any thought been given to supporting these teams with a smaller Data Center Tier? If so, what would that look like?

At this time the entry point for Data Center is the 500 user license, and we have no plans to add lower tiers. However, we will continue to capture input from our customers and partners in this area to make sure we have offerings that meet your needs.

[TJG] Debugging on Atlassian cloud can be... challenging. We don't have good access to the database or logs that many of us use for investigating problems. Has there been any thought given on how you can safely open up access to help the Admins of these instances?

[HJ] Atlassian's cloud products are architected specifically for cloud infrastructure, so they're not simply the server code ported to Cloud. We've evolved the architecture substantially to run our cloud products as modern multi-tenant SaaS services, so we can bring the real benefits of Cloud to our customers. So in terms of access to the database and logs, other enterprise SaaS products are a much better point of reference than our server or Data Center deployment options.

There are three main cases where admins rely on logs and database access for debugging today: performance and uptime, security and traceability, and change management. First, performance and uptime: when customers choose Atlassian's Cloud, they're entrusting us to run the software as their service provider. It's our obligation to deliver consistently fast and reliable service without putting a burden on admins. One key benefit of Cloud is we can invest in architecture improvements, monitoring, and redundancies at a far greater scale than any one customer. We've been able to increase the user limits on our cloud products fivefold in the last two years without compromising performance, and we have an aggressive roadmap for continued improvements. We also back up our reliability commitments with financially-backed SLAs in the Premium and Enterprise plans, but all customers receive the benefits of our reliability work, regardless of plan. 

Next, security and traceability: server and Data Center customers rely on a combination of raw application logs and network activity to investigate user behavior. While it's not feasible to provide customers direct access to this type of log in Cloud, we've made substantial progress improving the audit logging features of Atlassian Access to complement the existing audit logs in Jira and Confluence. The organization audit log now covers activities like user logins, changes to product access, and group membership changes across all products in an organization. We know that our most demanding customers need full traceability of all user actions. This is on our roadmap, and we're targeting an initial release later next year.

Last, change management: the best way we can help admins avoid debugging is to help them manage change in the first place. To that end, we've recently rolled out two major new investments to our Premium and Enterprise customers: sandboxes and release tracks. Sandboxes are a direct replacement for developer license keys in server and Data Center. For each production instance, you get a fully-enabled second cloud instance to test config changes, explore new features, or evaluate Marketplace apps. Release tracks allows customers to opt-in to receive updates from Atlassian on slower, fixed intervals for additional predictability into what exact changes are coming to your instance and when.

[TJG] Followup: Self Learning is an important skill for every Jira Admin to have. The fact is, we have a drought of people who are skilled in the installation or upgrading of Jira. To combat this, I've often recommended users get a ten user "Starter" Tier to experiment with setting up and upgrading Jira, and have even provided guides.

However, this tier is going away, even though the need is now arguably greater than ever. Is there any sort of plan to adopt a "Starter" tier for Data Center or other non-cloud sandboxes for people to learn how to set up, install, run, and upgrade Jira Data Center?

We offer a 30-day trial for Data Center versions of our products (and these trials can be requested to be extended). In addition, we have many Atlassian University courses specifically designed to train admins and users on setting up and installing Data Center products, including Jira (https://training.atlassian.com/jira-catalog).

Finally, we are continuing to build out our already extensive documentation library for admins.

So, what do you think?

This is my first time cross-posting an article to the Atlassian Community. If you are interested in seeing more from me, I post these articles a week earlier at https://thejiraguy.com. Otherwise, I'll see you right here next week! And until next time, Have you updated your Jira issues today?

[Andrew Laden]

Thanks for the interview, but it doesn't really add anything new, and doesn't provide any good news for existing server customers. It still feel like Atlassian is not listening to its existing on-prem customer base.

At this time the entry point for Data Center is the 500 user license, and we have no plans to add lower tiers. However, we will continue to capture input from our customers and partners in this area to make sure we have offerings that meet your needs.

Not proving a lower Tier is one of the major issues I have with this announcement. And their unwillingness to revisit it is very disheartening.

Over the past year, we've significantly invested in our Data Center offerings, ramping up the delivery of new enterprise-grade features like support for CDN, rate limiting, advanced auditing, and more. We also recently announced that we're including some of our most powerful Atlassian apps and new features with our Data Center subscriptions to help you meet your need for better collaboration and increased insights.

Jira Software Data Center: Advanced Roadmaps (formerly Portfolio for Jira)
Confluence Data Center: Team Calendars for Confluence, Analytics for Confluence
Jira Service Desk Data Center: Insight - Asset Management, Insight Discovery

Bundling existing products is not a sign of investment. it is a sign of stagnation. It means that they have determined that they can not make any money by selling them separately, so they are giving them away. Again leading to the conclusion that they are not going to be investing in them, since they are not making any money off them. 

There is actually very little of significance on the Data Center roadmap for Jira and Confluence that has to do with core functionality. A few things related to authentication and some back end items, but other then that, nothing.

We are making this move in response to changing customer demands since the vast majority of our customers are choosing cloud offerings to power their organizations.

They are choose cloud because Atlassian is marketing cloud so heavily (and now forcing it). It becomes a self fulfilling prophesy. Atlassian wants more users in the cloud because it is more profitable. So they market it heavily and try their best to steer people away from on-prem. They they tout how everyone is going cloud first. If they provided more love and support to on-prem then it might be a different story.

[Dave Liao]

@Andrew Laden - on the bright side, Atlassian's offering DC Community licenses for free for eligible organizations.

I feel like the announcement flew under the radar since I didn't hear about it until five days after it was announced. I guess I need to up my game on keeping up with Atlassian?

[Andrew Laden]

I didn't see that either. That's good news, Glad to see they are doing something. (though since those aren't paying customers, it still means less new business = less incentive to improve the product.)

[Jack Brickey]

I think this is an excellent article and provides some meaningful info on the underlying points that formed the server decision. Full disclosure, I had previously moved to cloud in my new company so am not personally and emotionally attached to server these days.