AWS hosted JIRA / Confluence Server - upgrade from AWS Linux to AWS Linux 2

Question

The RDS will remain identical, I just need to swap the EC2 machine to an EC2 machine running AWS Linux 2.

What is the best migration strategy?

Mere copying the directory /opt/atlassian would obviously not work. Exporting and importing all would be an overkill??

Andy Heinzer · Accepted Answer

Since it sounds like this is an upgrade to the operating system, I think the best course of action is to treat this as you would any other server migration.  Jira has a helpful guide in regards to Migrating JIRA applications to another server.   That guide is rather long, but it is comprehensive.    You could create a brand new database and then import an XML backup to this.  OR you could conversely just connect this new installation to your previous database.

However either method you choose, you still need to make sure that you restore your attachments and avatars that are contained as flat files in the $JIRAHOME/data/ subdirectories.   If you're upgrading Jira at the same time, make sure you restore those files before you connect to your old database/restore the XML backup.   However if you install the same version as you had in the older install, you can restore these files at any time.

Jira and Confluence are not really as concerned about the specific operating system you are running.  However it is important that you are using an Oracle version of Java. These are both java programs, and both have a requirement to specifically use Oracle's JRE or JDK for the JVM of these applications.  This is documented in the support platforms. I have seen users try to use another Java JVM such as openjdk, however this JVM is not supported for either Jira or Confluence.