My employer (large Fortune 500) recently "soft banned" Confluence and Jira, meaning groups already utilizing it can stay on it until our enterprise license runs out at the end of the yearly support contract. At first I thought it was really stupid decision as Confluence, at least, is fantastic product and Sharepoint/Notes (the enterprise replacement solution) is a horrid alternative. One of the admins said there were licensing issues that drove the decision. I figured someone was just being cheap but I bet this was the reason.
Atlassian moving to cloud-only, will stop selling server licenses
101–110 of 305 posts
Re: Atlassian moving to cloud-only, will stop selling server licenses
#102For any soon-to-be-ex Atlassian Server (self-hosted) customers, I've set up a Zulip server for discussing alternatives:
https://chat.goodbyeserver.org/
It's an difficult position Atlassian are inflicting on tens of thousands of customers. Atlassian's self-hosted products are uniquely flexible, being built on a plugin architecture, and many orgs have indeed customized Jira extensively with plugins, notably ScriptRunner [1]. Atlassian's Cloud plugins have their APIs, but have nothing like the same flexibility. A lot of functionality just isn't possible in the Cloud architecture. It's a bit like Firefox moving from XUL to an extension API.
In my opinion, the most customer-respecting way forward would be for Atlassian to open-source their discontinued Server product line. Go to the "open core" model with the clustered Data Center product as the upsell. This avoids screwing over their customers, and if their Cloud product really is as good as they say, customers will migrate to it naturally over time. It's the kind of damn-the-torpedoes move I think Mike CB would like.
But over the next 3 years, lots of painful migrating or evaluating-of-alternatives will need to happen, and perhaps a non-Atlassian forum for sharing experiences will help.
[1] https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/6820/scriptrunner-for...
Re: Atlassian moving to cloud-only, will stop selling server licenses
#103I can't imagine our management will be happy about this. We have server licenses and I don't think we'll be willing to turn our data over to their servers.
On the other hand, this is great for me because I pretty much hate using all of these products. If this gets my company to stop using them, I will be so happy.
Re: Atlassian moving to cloud-only, will stop selling server licenses
#104We're using Jira, Confluence, and BitBucket on-prem at our DC now, on some pretty sizeable VM's with good network connectivity back to head office. Despite that, it feels very slow. Not the occasional 10+ second page load, where you've accidentally clicked something that happens to generate a cascade of cache misses. I can forgive that kind of infrequent performance hiccup. But rather, regular usage, especially of Co…
Atlassian does not provide particularly good guidance on how to get their tools to perform well. The first big issue for any moderately busy system is that you need to dedicate huge gobs of heap memory (think 16G+) to the tool. After that, they suffer from poor schema design - there are tables that are literally missing indexes on commonly queried columns, and some columns that have delimited values embedded in them.…
>It's hard for me to see how "Java" and "cloud" go together.
Netflix.
> It's hard for me to imagine that atlassian would allow individual instances of jira/confluence/etc in their cloud versions to get nearly as much resources as you need to give them on-prem
Yes, which is why the atlasaian cloud is no longer a collection of individual customer instances. More details: https://youtu.be/0N4KknY_zdU
Re: Atlassian moving to cloud-only, will stop selling server licenses
#105This is entirely because they had to fork their product and codebase between cloud and on-prem, and their resulting total failure on execution on their internal product roadmap. Atlasssian has demonstrated a chronic inability over the past few years to maintain feature parity between what are effectively two different products. Atlasssian has had a really, really terrible feature execution delivery pace over the past…
It's insane that they had to that rather than giving their On-Prem version the ability to scale the way you need a SaaS service to scale. Turning your SaaS Ops team into an On-Prem customer is a great way to dog-food your product.
Atlassian's Cloud products were initially (~2009) just the Server products with a few plugins bolted on to unify the UI, deployed in bulk. Over time the backends diverged, and here we are.
Re: Atlassian moving to cloud-only, will stop selling server licenses
#106I really hope this happens! My organisation will be certain to ditch JIRA and Confluence.
+1
Re: Atlassian moving to cloud-only, will stop selling server licenses
#107This sounds like a terrible move and will probably force all medium-size organizations I work with to ditch Atlassian. We have the technical know-how to administer data center versions of their products, but we can’t do shit if they force potential customers to pay for a minimum of 40 000 USD for a license per product. Many of these orgs have multiple Atlassian products so this will probably end up doubling costs on…
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Re: Atlassian moving to cloud-only, will stop selling server licenses
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Atlassian does not provide particularly good guidance on how to get their tools to perform well. The first big issue for any moderately busy system is that you need to dedicate huge gobs of heap memory (think 16G+) to the tool. After that, they suffer from poor schema design - there are tables that are literally missing indexes on commonly queried columns, and some columns that have delimited values embedded in them.…
> It's hard for me to imagine that atlassian would allow individual instances of jira/confluence/etc in their cloud versions to get nearly as much resources as you need to give them on-prem. I always wondered that, too! Like, you'd think that if you have devs building a product and a team running a hosted instance of the product in the same company, that they'd have a very good feedback loop and make it easy to run t…
They don’t.
They forked the code base around 5 years ago now. Cloud/on prem.
Cloud is or was multi tenanted, you didn’t get your own isolated server, you got routed to some compute that would then pull data at request time based on your tenant id.
With a hard fork of two seperate product streams it was inevitable at some point maintaining feature parity between products would get to much.
Java and cloud go together quite nicely. Backend services, a JVM that has now be tuned for many many years by lots of clever people. If you have a long lived service it works really well. It works better than your node js app running a single instance on a multi core server with the event loop getting blocked.
Re: Atlassian moving to cloud-only, will stop selling server licenses
#109Are there good self-hosted alternatives for those of use who'd like to get off of Atlassian products? For Bamboo, I immediately think of Jenkins, although it's showing its age now. For Confluence, I think of Media Wiki. For BitBucket, I think of self-hosted GitLab. Not sure about Jira or Service Desk, though. I'd appreciate any better suggestions.
The problem is that a lot of people will reach for Gitlab to replace Jira, or MediaWiki/Dokuwiki (or again, Gitlab) to replace Confluence. But for businesses that have adapted business processes to use them, Gitlab/MediaWiki/Dokuwiki simply don't cut the mustard. We have an extensively customized Jira installation that's used for tracking budget requests, cage access tickets, and system change requests--none of those fit into a "bug/task/defect" tracker like Redmine or Github Issues. And for anyone who's gotten a manager using Confluence's editor, moving to writing wiki source in Dokuwiki is a big step backwards.
The thing Atlassian had going for them is that we could get our non-technical people to use their stuff, understand it, and even customize it themselves to meet their needs. I'm not looking forward to trying to bend some other issue-tracking system to do it, so I'm guessing we'll pony up for the DC-class charges (for the few years they continue offering that option) and see if a competitor emerges.
Re: Atlassian moving to cloud-only, will stop selling server licenses
#110This is a big problem for our non-profit organization. All of our documentation is stored in Confluence. We are fortunate enough to use a free Community license for self hosted servers, but this announcement would remove the free Community license and would force us into a Community Cloud license that would cost us over $4k a year. Are there any good, possibly open source, alternatives available for non-profits?
Depending on what you have, you might look at Xwiki (xwiki.com) or Bookstack (www.bookstackapp.com). I find Xwiki's look-and-feel not as nice as Confluence's, but they have many of the same features and they have a migration guide for importing data from Confluence.