totally frustrated newbie needs help & mentoring to install Confluence & Jira on AWS

[Larry Gary]

All,

Is anyone out there available and agreeable to collaborate for the setup of Jira & Confluence on AWS Amazon Web Services?

We're absolutely new to Atlassian with zero prior experience. We have the prerequisite knowledge of AWS and EC2. Also have enough Linux experience to perform simple tasks. Need mentoring to step through the installation of Jira & Confluence on Linux, slowly, explain every step. I've searched for documentation for more than a month, but there's little to nothing available that makes sense. Perhaps the information is there somewhere, but it's not intelligible unless I study for another year and become a Linux system administrator.

I hope to discover enough about Confluence and Jira to create two configurations:

(1) Configure stand-alone, single AWS EC2 instances for each product, Jira & Confluence.

(2) Configure stand-alone, single AWS EC2 instances for each product, Jira & Confluence, but use AWS RDS managed databases.

Our requirements are minimal. Would like to use Confluence & Jira for several small teams where each team has up to 10 users. Each team will get their own pair of Jira & Confluence EC2 servers. No, we don't want Atlassian Cloud.

Can anyone spend an hour to help? After that past 4 weeks of totally frustrating research, I will document whatever we discover and make it public to help alleviate the anguish of the next person who comes along. Thank you very much!

[Steffen Opel _Utoolity_]

Given you have the prerequisite AWS knowledge, the best way to achieve configuration 2 might be via the AWS Quick Starts for Jira Data Center and Confluence Data Center:

As long as you restrict the Auto Scaling group to a single node, it used to be possible to simply install a Server license instead of a Data Center license (please note that I haven't done this for a while and things may have changed).

Of course, the backing CloudFormation templates are authored with Data Center deployments in mind and don't provide particularly cost effective parameters for small team deployments, but you can adjust the templates with respectively smaller EC2 and RDS instance types for example.

Also, each quick start deploy its own RDS instance, but you could extract the database to a separate template and reuse it for both Jira and Confluence, similar to how the VPC can optionally be shared between them.

Either way, those templates and the accompanying documentation should provide you with some ideas on how to achieve your goals and certainly a better starting point then starting a new infrastructure as code deployment for Jira and Confluence from scratch.

Good luck!

[Craig Castle-Mead]

Hey Larry,

To start, isn’t recommend taking it in small chunks.

1 - download Jira, start it (exactly as it using the internal database, change your security groups to allow TCP 8080 through, check it works from your browser

2 - install mysql locally, reinstall JIRA and point it to your local mysql, check it works

3 - install a reverse proxy (Apache or nginx), listening on 80 and forwarding to 8080, adjust your security group (add 80, remove 8080), check it works

4 - add SSL to the mix, you’ll need to adjust Apache/nginx and the server.xml file, add 443 to your security group

5 - add an RDS instance to your environment,  check you can get to it from the ec2 instance running JIRA, reinstall JIRA and point it at the RDS host. Reapply your server.xml changes from above so SSL is working

6 - do the same for Confluence, but you may be able to just go straight to the desired setup of RDS+proxy

Not sure where you’re located or if there’s an Atlassians user Group (AUG) around but that would be a great resource if it is available. 

CCM 

[Larry Gary]

Thanks to both Steffen and Craig. This helps move us closer to installing Confluence and Jira. I like the sequence of tasks provided by Craig and the template idea from Steffen. Per Craig's suggestion, I joined the Atlassian User Group here in Washington, D.C. and look forward to attending some of the group functions later this year.

I'm going to persist until we have Confluence & Jira actually working. It's surprising there are no direct instructions and a simple way to actually install these products. I question the Atlassian business model when their products are so inaccessible on the AWS platform. I'll study for another month and post the exact steps with all the detail so that simple people like me can easily follow. Thanks.

[Craig Castle-Mead]

Hey Larry,

Glad to hear it was helpful. 

While yes, it's helpful to have an exact list of steps you can copy and paste for your requirements - the sheer combination of possibilities that people could be using is immense (AWS, Azure, GCP - nginx/apache - windows/linux, let alone which flavor of linux, mysql/psql/mssql etc etc) so the documentation is usually broken in to bite size chunks.

The below two pages cover the basics. Adjusting to use RDS is a trivial change in the setup process to use the RDS host instead of a local MySQL database.

1. https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/installing-jira-applications-on-linux-938846841.html
2. https://confluence.atlassian.com/conf59/using-apache-with-virtual-hosts-and-mod_proxy-792499654.html

It would be interesting to understand the "don't want to use Atlassian Cloud" comment as well. If server is the direction you go, not having a team that are quite familiar with the setup process and already comfortable as a Linux Sys admin would be a potential risk to your organization.

CCM