Looking for anyone who made the switch to Data Center

[Jess Seitz]

The Jira Marketing team is putting together an ebook on migrating to Data Center. We're looking for pro tips on how you staffed your project team and organized your Proof of Concept.

Share your thoughts, feedback, or recommendations and we'll feature you in our upcoming ebook! 

Feel free to also contact me directly at jseitz@atlassian.com with any feedback you're willing to provide.  

[Bryan Trummer]

Hi @Jess Seitz - We are currently in the process of migrating over to Data Center. We plan on implementing in Prod by mid-November. We are currently in the User Acceptance Testing part of our project plan with the next step Production!

Best Advice - Utilize the documentation Atlassian is putting out for Data Center!

•  Team Tip - Bring in members who are experts in their area. Data Center has a lot of moving parts and having a member of the project team that understands a certain part is valuable. We brought in a Unix engineer, a DBA, file sharing system engineer, load balancing engineer.
• Team Tip - Ensure your project team has a member or leader that understands what Data Center is intended to do and how it pertains to your current and future goals.
• Team Tip - If you have a contact with your Enterprise Advocate don't be afraid to ask them questions. They have knowledge of the system and can bring in others as well to help out with areas you might get stuck on by giving valuable advice.

• PoC Tip - Don't be afraid to PoC each aspect of Data Center. We did a PoC of our file sharing system, load balancing, and JIRA application. 
• PoC Tip - Test replication across nodes so you understand the time it takes something to go from one node to the other.
• PoC Tip - We did a Data Center performance test against our current production setup (server) executing the most commonly used functions for our JIRA instance.
• PoC Tip - If you notice something is not behaving the way you thought or performance was not as expected don't be afraid to take a quick look at your setup. As I mentioned before there is a lot of moving parts in Data Center, check your setup!
• PoC Tip - Get your everyday users to do the testing as well. They are doing alot of things everyday in JIRA. By adding a few of them into the PoC testing most of your areas will be covered and even some functions you might not think of as well.
• PoC Tip - Do the upgrade process a few times as its a little bit different than Server upgrades so you want to ensure you understand it to make it a real zero down-time upgrade.

[Jess Seitz]

Thank you for the thoughtful tips and advice, Bryan. There's some great information here that we can use in our upcoming eBook! 

I'm interested to learn a little bit more about how you staffed your team. You mentioned you brought in a Unix engineer, a DBA, file sharing system engineer, and load balancing engineer. Which additional roles are in your Data Center team? 

[Bryan Trummer]

We also had a project manager who worked with us to get key milestones and estimated dates to achieve those milestones to keep the project on track. That with the previous mentioned were the core members of the project team, we did include other departments such as infrastructure, server team, and remaining UNIX team to review the performance results of our PoC. Their role was to see the current setup we had with the compared results to production and bring up any concerns they may have had during that time so we could tweak our setup.

[Jess Seitz]

Got it, thanks. Can you contact me via email (jseitz@atlassian.com) and I'll reach out to discuss the next steps for including your advice in the ebook? 

[Bryan Trummer]

Certainly!

[Daniel Ciarlette]

We are running our JIra Data Center on AWS.  It was really pretty straightforward to get it up and running.  We did have to work with Atlassian and AWS on HSTS requirements.  

Remember to make sure all of your addons are data center compatible.

[Jess Seitz]

Thanks Daniel, yeah that's a great point about ensuring your apps are compatible for Data Center.

Can you email me directly at jseitz@atlassian.com so I can gather a few more details about your instance for the ebook? 

[Abdullah_Fahim]

Would be great to have your input on HSTS and see something on that in the ebook.

[Tanya L Christensen]

My team moved from Server to Data Center last year.  It's been a great transition... a bit bumpy at first but working great now.  I didn't personally assist in the transition but am on the support and service team so worked with our user base to keep them informed about our load balancing and availability.

[Tanya L Christensen]

@James_E__Hunt - FYI

[Jess Seitz]

Thanks for sharing @Tanya L Christensen, glad to hear it's working great for you now! Would your team be interested in sharing how their Jira Data Center deployment team was staffed, as well as advice for others planning their transition? 

[James E_ Hunt _ASRC Federal_]

@Jess Seitz, follow-up with Brad Bresseler, he's familiar with our team and suite. 

[Sheila Richardson]

We made the switch to data center two weeks ago and have seen a considerable improvements in the systems performance. During Maintenance of the system we no longer have downtime. Before data center we had up to 45 minutes of downtime. We also have seen where plugins have sometimes caused our systems to slow down or have outages it no longer happens. We are very happy with the switch to DC.

[Jess Seitz]

Glad to hear you no longer have downtime @Sheila Richardson! How was the process of moving to Data Center? Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently or a part of the planning process you'd recommend others should do?  

[scherbank]

We are running huge Jira and moved to DC. Performance is better but Atlassian only provide info for App itself. So DB and LB issues are all yours together with add/ons verification.

[Jess Seitz]

Thanks for the feedback @scherbank. Was there other information you would have appreciated from Atlassian to support your transition to DC? 

[George Lewe (LSY)]

We have just started our project of upgrading from JIRA Server to DC and from Confluence Server to DC. At the same time we will migrate from a legacy data center to our own Azure based cloud. We are also facing a move from MySQL to Postgres for both applications since that is the recommended DB engine for DC.

We are Premier Support subscribers and also hired an Atlassian partner to support us so we are prepared for the troubles we expect.

Will keep you posted here about our experiences...

[Jess Seitz]

Looking forward to hearing more about your experience! 

[George Lewe (LSY)]

First challenge we are working on is clean-up, backup and export. It turns out that our databases and files are so large that exports fail because of not enough memory and disk space. Another challenge is how to get terabytes of data from the data center to the cloud. We actually discussed putting them on a USB drive and drive them from one town to another.

So first thing we do now is clean-up, clean-up, clean-up, like deleting obsolete projects, old page and attachment revisions, unused schemes etc. etc. Just removing page revisions older than 2 years decreased the Confluence database by one third in a test.

Stay tuned...

[Jess Seitz]

Hi everyone,

Wanted to say a collective thank you to this group for sharing feedback on your Data Center deployments! Thanks to your input, we are featuring 4 key customer learnings in our brand new e-book: A guide for Assembling your Jira Data Center team. 

If other learnings come to mind, let's keep the conversation going! There is an opportunity to continue developing more content on this topic.

Happy Holidays!