Hi @Kelvin Tuggle
from the answers Laurens already gave I can see you have received many useful and true tips already.
For your question:
Unfortunately I am not clear on "How the Suite of Applications" interact with each other and their dependencies.
This could be split up in a two-sided answer. From a users view each application adds value to the whole picture - Confluence enhances the users's experiencing providing a knowledge base, or a wiki-solution, like some say.
From a technical view, like Laurens said, there are Application Links between the applications. They were invented to let all the applications exchange data between them.
When aiming for an upgrade of, let's say, Jira - or Confluence - they will work afterwards like they did before the upgrade.
One hint that comes to my mind, though:
Assuming Jira and Confluence (or any of the other applications you mentioned, like Bamboo or Bitbucket) can be upgraded independently - however, if they share one database host which is on a specific version make sure this is compatible with the version of the application you want to upgrade to.
In case it is not you will need to upgrade the database version to a supported one first (f.e. PostgreSQL 9.4 -> 11) but then you will need to make sure the "other" applications are still capable of supporting this version number.
This warning does not apply if:
- you are going to upgrade all applications during the same change/downtime
or
- if you have several VMs holding the database each for every application
Apart from that cloning the VM is a great idea, as well as testing in non-production environments first, and finally, having a fall back (backup).
Some more general things wildly picked from your post:
- if you need to put a database driver to 'lib' directory depends on which database you are using (PostgreSQL needs no separate driver, MySQL will)
- it might be also a good idea to backup database before upgrade
- for dependencies a downtime of one application does not mean the other ones fail hard per se, but in case Bamboo is down probably no deployments will be done for that time, so Bitbucket is still operational but not providing a full chain of value this time, when Confluence is down that does not mean that Jira could not work, however users that require information from the knowledgebase cannot solve issues in Jira because they cannot gather the informationen needed to provide answers to customers.
These are just examples but I am sure you get the idea.
- I saw scenarios where the exact times for what needs to be upgraded first was aligned with "end of life" document to be found here:
https://confluence.atlassian.com/support/atlassian-support-end-of-life-policy-201851003.html
Some users prefer to never get into "end of life" situations to make sure they can still receive support from Atlassian - also from a security aspect they prefer supported versions.
Let us know if something is left unclear or does not make sense.
Cheers,
Daniel
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