THE IMPACT OF ATLASSIAN′S SERVER & DATA CENTER CHANGES ON YOUR MIGRATION STRATEGY

You might have heard about the announcement from Atlassian about the end of support of their server line of products. The real end of life for Server is foreseen for the beginning of 2024 so in theory there is no rush. However, some changes will already be in effect on Feb 1, 2021 so we thought we'd bring you some clarity. So let’s see what some of the fundamental dates of these changes are that will start in February 2021.

Summary

Atlassian is going to the cloud, cloud, cloud

There are strong incentives in place for you to move

There is time but you need to start planning now

Timeline

There are two dates you should consider as a reference: February second, 2021 which is the date on which Atlassian will stop selling server product licenses and subsequently February second of the following years until 2024.

On February second, 2024 Atlassian will end all product maintenance activities for the Server product. This means that the license will continue to be valid because, as written in the license agreement itself, it is a perpetual lifetime license, so the server product will continue to work but no more bug fixes will be released, Atlassian will no longer be providing support and security patches will no longer be released.

Remember that Atlassian currently supports three product lines: Server that is the classic on prem version that progressively will no longer be supported. Data center, which is designed for large customers, large installations, clustered instances supported by high availability policies and finally the Cloud version which is a software as a service version.

And the idea of Atlassian is that most of its customers will not continue to use the server version but switch to one of the other two product lines.

In between these two milestones, Feb 2nd 2021 and Feb 2nd 2024, there are some stages that could progressively facilitate the transition path but should also encourage people to make a conscious analysis of what their future options are. At the same time as the end of the license sale planned for Feb 2021, the active development of all Atlassian products for the server line will be stopped.

So there will no longer be any development of new features for Jira software, Confluence, Service desk, BItbucket and also for all marketplace applications that Atlassian owns like Portfolio for Jira, which is now officially called Advanced roadmaps, Insights, Team Calendar and others. The exception are two products that are widely used in the developer world, Fish eye and Crucible. These products are not affected by end of support. They have been passed to a stage called basic maintenance. They are considered mature products with a slower evolution and a different lifecycle.

Let’s return to all the products that will be affected by this change.

As of Feb 2022, the possibility of upgrading and downgrading existing installations will end. So until Feb 2021 you can purchase licenses for new installations. After February 2021 it will be possible to renew licenses and even propose upgrades and downgrades.

For example, if in October 2021 I would want to grow from 100 to 200 Confluence users for example, I can certainly do so. And if I would want to reduce my Jira licenses from 150 to 100 I can do that as well. After Feb1, 2022 that will no longer be possible.

Finally, on Feb 1, 2023 Atlassian will also end the sale of 3rd party software for the on-premise Server version. Examples are products like project configurator, configuration manager, script runner, etc. After that date your instance will be frozen in the state in which it is at that point.

Why these different timelines? This is because Atlassian has full control over their own product lines, but it must also give third party vendors time to adapt to new needs.

Strong incentives to change

Atlassian is putting in place a strong incentive mechanism, both positive and negative via pricing and discounting. One of these mechanisms is the fact that the prices of the server licenses but also data center licenses will increase as early as February 2, 2021.

Conversely, for customers who already have a server license and are ready to move to the cloud or data center version, Atlassian has created generous discount policies.

So the overall Atlassian strategy is pretty clear, the earlier you migrate the better.

Cloud vs Datacenter

But you also have to understand what it means to migrate because the products are not all the same, it's not just a matter of differences in licensing and pricing, there are differences in terms of functionality.

Data center is similar to server as it represents another type of on-premise installation but it supports additional features such as high availability, clustering, and load balancing for example. Cloud however is a substantially different product. It is not just software as a service, it has different functionality and a different product and integration design logic,  

However, Atlassian is investing a lot of money to close the gaps that exist between cloud and the on-premise data center versions. At a certain moment in the future Atlassian will reach a tipping point, similar to what other software vendors have done, where the newest functionality will be first delivered in the cloud before it reaches the on-premise versions.

Currently however there are limitations to the cloud version. For example, the number of supported users is limited to 10.000 to guarantee a certain level of performance, however there will be very few customers that need more than 10.000 users.

Some apps are not available as cloud versions yet or are available with less functionality which currently might not fulfil your needs.

Custom development will be more limited and there are off course issues related with data residency. In the cloud you do not have a 100% control of where your data resides. In Europe, Atlassian uses data centres in Ireland and Germany. Think of things like Brexit which is just around the corner or the July 2020 sentence by the Court of justice of the European Union on the validity of EU SSC′s or standard contractual clauses.  

Currently Atlassian offers data residency for products with Enterprise plans. You can choose to host certain product data in Europe or the United States. For other Atlassian products the situation can be different. Most of Atlassian products are running on the AWS cloud but some are still hosted with other vendors in one single region. If you want to know more just google the sentence Where does Atlassian store data? or ask us directly.

What are your options and what should you probably do?

At atSistemas our advice is to orient yourself toward the cloud products unless you have very specific needs.

Why is that? Well, Data center is intended to be a niche product line for customers with many users. We are talking about 500,1000 to 5000 or10,000 users and it is also the most expensive product. Furthermore, Atlassian has made it very clear that Cloud is the future for them. In the figure below you will find a simple flowchart with your options depicted.

So if you are ready to move to the cloud using a SaaS solution and to decommission server now you should start planning your move, taking into account the incentives and limitations that Atlassian is putting in place around server.

If you are not ready now you have to ask yourself if you will be ready in 2024? If the answer is yes you should reevaluate every year when to move to the cloud and if you are ready you should move when you can as you can take advantage of aggressive discounts.

If the cloud SaaS solution does not work for you because you have specific needs around data access and control or data residency for example, you should already start to think about migrating to DataCenter.

How can we help?

For us the idea of migrating your Atlassian stack is not something that appears now with the announcement of the end of support of Server. It's something we've done for a long time for our customers who for one reason or another, like wanting a clustered platform or the desire to move to a 3rd party PaaS platform or because they already wanted to move to a Saas cloud solution have asked for our help in migration projects.

Here you can see some of our references like for example list Carrefour, Carglass or the Spanish Government. You can also see that we have experience moving to the Atlassian Saas and PaaS cloud, but also moving to a Datacenter solution running either in Amazons′ or Microsoft's′ cloud. This has helped us better understand the possibilities and limitations of each of these platforms and has helped us to refine our migration methodologies.

And here you can see some more references from other customers. The message we want to give here is we have already done a lot of migrations and we know how to do this very well.

Migration Assesment

What we would like to propose to you is an assessment session where we look at the As- Is and To- Be situation. 

In the As Is we look at things like Pros and cons of Cloud and the different versions (Standard, Premium, Enterprise) vs Data Center, which Products to migrate, what Purchased Marketplace apps you have and their compatibility and support for Cloud and Data Center environments. What Custom developments and integrations with other tools you have. What User requirements, storage requirements, security and compliance requirements and what data residency needs you have.

In the To Be situation we will work with you on possible scenarios and we deliver a comprehensive report with a Recommendation of the option that best suits your needs, including Infrastructure estimates and order of cost magnitude in the case of Data Center and Order of magnitude of the cost of migration, Licensing costs, etc.

Migration methodology and codified IP

We have a wealth of experience with all different kinds of Atlassian migrations. We have defined a methodology and codified the steps and IP necessary to do a successful migration. These steps are different of course based on the applicable scenario. One scenario is to move from server to the Atlassian Cloud.

Another scenario is to move a server instance to a single node data center instance, where the differences with server are not that relevant, the migration is easy and you take advantage of all the extra functionality DC delivers and yet another scenario is moving to datacenter with a clustered solution.

In addition, as you may have already seen, in the references we have presented before, we have extensive experience with deployment of Atlassian Datacenter on Azure or AWS.

For these situations we have materials and methodology to facilitate things like platform provisioning and configuration, parameterization of Atlassian in production environments, set up of back-up policies, monitoring with for example Azure Application Gateway or CloudWatch (AWS) and predefined operating manuals

This has been a short and high level overview of the licensing and product changes at Atlassian and your future options and scenarios. If you have any further questions, let us know and we are happy to get the right people in front of you and to jump on a call or videoconference to see how we can help you.

Thank you!