Introducing our newest AWS Quick Start: Crowd Data Center

[#1]

We’re thrilled to present to you our latest AWS Quick Start for Crowd Data Center. This Quick Start helps you deploy and maintain cluster-ready Crowd Data Center on AWS, configured with scale and security in mind. The Quick Start’s underlying CloudFormation templates provides you with best-practice options and defaults, most of which we use ourselves on our own internal Crown instances.

The AWS Quick Start for Crowd Data Center lets you deploy:

• Cluster-ready infrastructure, allowing you to scale Crowd Data Center vertically or horizontally according to load

• An AWS CloudWatch instance for basic application node and database monitoring

• Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL in a multi-AZ configuration, providing database high availability

• An Application Load Balancer, which works as a load balancer and SSL termination reverse proxy

Atlassian Standard Infrastructure

You can use the AWS Quick Start for Crowd Data Center to deploy on a new or existing Atlassian Standard Infrastructure (ASI). The ASI is a highly available and secure virtual private cloud (VPC) customized to integrate Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Crowd. So if you have any existing Atlassian services deployed using our Quick Starts, you can now deploy and integrate Crowd with the rest of them.

CloudFormation templates

The AWS Quick Start for Crowd Data Center uses CloudFormation templates to deploy and configure all necessary infrastructure. These templates are available from GitHub for you to clone, review and customize for your team’s needs:

https://github.com/atlassian/quickstart-atlassian-crowd

References

For more information about this Quick Start, refer to:

• Crowd Data Center on the AWS Cloud Quick Start Reference Deployment (AWS documentation)

• Running Crowd in an AWS cluster

• Maintaining a Crowd cluster on AWS

For more information about our other Quick Starts, see:

• AWS Quick Starts for Atlassian products now auto-detect existing infrastructure (AWS blog)

• Data Center on AWS

[Taranjeet Singh]

That's a really great news! Thanks for sharing!

[M Amine]

Using AWS with Atlassian tools is great. But sometimes, it can a challenging to get them work when you want to put some advanced configuration. For example using a AWS Content Delivery Network (CDN). Please share some insight on this. 

[ddomingo]

Hi @M Amine ! If you mean using Amazon CloudFront as your CDN, we prepared a CloudFormation template for setting one up:

• Configure your CDN to cache assets (Jira)
• Configure your CDN to cache assets (Confluence)
• Configure your CDN to cache assets (Bitbucket)

After setting up the CDN, integrate the CDN with your Jira, Confluence, or Bitbucket deployment via the product's admin UI (instructions are on the same page).

Our AWS Quick Starts for Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Crowd are all suitable for most types of Large-sized deployments. We optimized them for customers with little to intermediate experience in AWS who are interested in deploying fully functional, well-configured AWS infrastructure for their Atlassian Data Center products. 

Users with more advanced skills in AWS can also fork the same CloudFormation templates used by these Quick Starts and customize them as needed. You can find them on the following Github repos:

• https://github.com/aws-quickstart/quickstart-atlassian-jira
• https://github.com/aws-quickstart/quickstart-atlassian-confluence
• https://github.com/aws-quickstart/quickstart-atlassian-bitbucket
• https://github.com/aws-quickstart/quickstart-atlassian-crowd

Hope that helps! 

[M Amine]

Hi @ddomingo 

Have you tried setting Crowd behind the CDN successfully? Because we went into some trouble and Crowd configuration was not described in any Atlassian documentation. Please refer to this discussion. 

[ddomingo]

Hi @M Amine : Crowd doesn't provide an interface for connecting to a CDN. Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket have an interface for this (both UI and API). Crowd does not officially supports CDN (it's not listed in the Server vs DC comparison page).

Is there a particular reason you want a CDN with Crowd? We use CDN mainly for caching static assets. This is supposed to give end-users across different regions lower latency when accessing Jira, Confluence, or Bitbucket pages. As far as I can tell, typical users don't regularly access Crowd directly, so a CDN won't actually benefit them as much (I don't think it'll speed up authentications/SSO).

[M Amine]

Hi @ddomingo 

CDN is needed because we have a WAF (and an ELB).