21 ms·

Atlassian moving to cloud-only, will stop selling server licenses

380 points by ameshkov 6y ago

dqh 6y ago
We use Bitbucket server because we prefer the code review UI and the diff views over everything else. I was shocked when I tried the cloud version and saw how different and how much worse it was. Would otherwise actually prefer to move to cloud but not with that UI, will re-eval competitors instead.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  I don't know about the other products, but I was always told that Bitbucket is literally 2 separate products with unrelated codebases that Atlassian just branded the same. Take with a grain of salt because I have no good source, but consider that ex. on-prem BB never supported Mercurial (which was cloud BB's big selling point for me), and their UIs were quite different.
  - brodie 6y ago
    I don’t know what the products are like today, but you’re right that they’ve historically been two separate products with totally different implementations.
TJSomething 6y ago
Dang. I actually like how customizable Jira's workflows are. What else is good at customizable Scrum-like workflows with custom fields?
- joejerryronnie 6y ago
  Check out TargetProcess
- vaceletm 6y ago
  I'm part of the dev team so take this comment with the level of distance you want but you should have a look at Tuleap [1]. You get the customization to yet another level as you are not constraint by the fact that templates are shared across your organization. You can tweak and customize every single tracker (issue type) with it's own fields & values without impacting others and without depending on an admin for that. You can deep dive with https://blog.tuleap.org/tuleap-versus-jira-software/ https://blog.tuleap.org/tuleap-versus-jira-software/ [1] https://www.tuleap.org/ https://www.tuleap.org/
hkchad 6y ago
Long time atlassian user, guess it was a good run but I'll be migrating to something else.
ggm 6y ago
Working with this product in contexts caught between on-premises, self-hosted cloud and fully outsource, with a tussle amongst the consumers/users, the payers and the operators, I predict more argument in my working life as we re-equipoise around this.
merb 6y ago
that looks like a killing blow.
ameshkov 6y ago
This just makes me extremely sad. Server products is what made us purchase Atlassian software. There are numerous reasons why our company (and a lot of other companies I presume) would like to avoid cloud. And if we really had to go cloud, I simply don't see why we would choose Atlassian over alternatives.
- alelefant 6y ago
  What are your companies reasons for avoiding cloud?
RantyDave 6y ago
Smells of opportunity to me.
- petre 6y ago
  Yup. But the alternatives have to be optionally containerized, easier to install maintain and upgrade. It's not 2009 any more.
Rebelgecko 6y ago
Wow. This must feel like a huge fuck-you to people that migrated to Atlassian because they could host things locally (I worked at a place that made the leap 3 years ago and it was a somewhat controversial decision. I feel kinda bad for everyone that'll be hearing an "I told you so" on Monday morning). Not only is the product being killed, they're raising the price during the migration period. Their FAQ also hints that even more price increases are coming. I imagine they'll lose a lot of customers that can't or won't send all of their data into the cloud
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- addicted 6y ago
  And they are doing all of this while Microsoft is strengthening its competitive offerings.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- nikanj 6y ago
  It's the Oracle playbook. F*ck customers, make money. Seems to work rather well, actually!
  - swiley 6y ago
    This is why you always have to figure out what abandoning the software you pick would look like before you integrate into everything else.
barlo 6y ago
Following the Adobe playbook?
Jedd 6y ago
We'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 Confluence and Jira, just feels sluggish when doing bread and butter actions - adding a comment to a ticket or reloading a kanban view, loading a new page or opening the search dialog on Confluence. Yet, everything I've heard about the responsiveness of the 'cloud' offering is that it drives people to move to the on-prem server version.
- originalvichy 6y ago
  I don’t share the same experiences with slowness (maybe we do something right on the instances we manage). I do however experience slowness in cloud. I assume they increase cloud resources in some kinds of steps that make them appear extremely sluggish.
  - confluence_perf 6y ago
    Sorry to hear it's been a frustrating experience. I'm a PM for Confluence Cloud and we're always trying to make it better. Would you be willing to share more specifics, such as: - Pages with content X are the slowest - Trying to do A/B/C is annoyingly slow - etc ?
    - vasco 6y ago
      Surely you have metrics?
      - Bombthecat 6y ago
        If your avarage is always 10 seconds, 7 is fast!
      - confluence_perf 6y ago
        Hi vasco, We have a lot of metrics, and we recognize that Confluence is not as fast or as good an experience as it should be. However nothing beats user feedback - hearing specific feedback from users may provide us with specific areas that we can focus our work, on top of the work we're already doing. If you have any feedback like that, we're hopeful you're willing to share it with us.
x87678r 6y ago
Anyone got a good opensource Jira alternative I can install locally? Most alternatives are cloud as well.
- riffic 6y ago
  Traditionally, redmine. Non-traditionally I'd say GitLab. Try looking here: https://alternativeto.net/software/jira/?license=opensource https://alternativeto.net/software/jira/?license=opensource
- originalvichy 6y ago
  Keep checking HN for the next week. I hope we see some good alternatives.
- jasonv 6y ago
  Anyone still use Trac? [https://trac.edgewall.org https://trac.edgewall.org] We were using it up until a while ago (edit: oh, did the math, 7 years ago)... could still totally get by with it. I keep my free Jira/Cloud account going, but when I look elsewhere, I don't really love the options either (Clubhouse, looking at you).
  - 3np 6y ago
    To each their own I guess - Clubhouse has been a change for the better in every way compared to JIRA for me/us (cloud-only, though)
  - user5994461 6y ago
    At the largest bank I worked with. Trac was the primary wiki that was in use for almost 15 years (largely abandoned for the last 5). Think 10 000 wiki pages and documents written by a thousand developers over the span of entire careers. Note that Trac is abandoned software, for example it cannot run on python 3, there's been issues filled on that for years and there's simply no effort to maintain it. I decommissioned it last year (hint: there's a long and painful migration story here). Users and documents have migrated to Sphinx, that's been actively used for the past 10 years and was always supposed to replace trac (hint: there's a longer story on how to handle or not handle a migration here). It looks really good but the markup and editing tool is not really user friendly. A few teams decided to move to the internal confluence instead, that's supposed to be the strategic solution in the company. Looks like they're up for another migration within 3 years.
failuser 6y ago
Will they launch a local-first fake competitor?
originalvichy 6y ago
This 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 several products at the same time effectively making it a money sink and impossible to justify to their budgeting. I would have been perfectly OK with DC taking over server with similar pricing, but this is just a monumentally idiotic greed-driven move. Now small-medium-large organizations are either forced to pay A LOT of money for self-hosting their highly protected data or either use their cloud. The latter is out of question for almost all of the organisations I know. If I was a Microsoft or another enterprise tech company I’d hire a thousand engineers tomorrow to develop a Jira/Confluence competitor before the grace period for server licenses ends. All that engineering money will pay itself back whent they can sell modern collab tools without tech debt from 15 years ago for a price we can tolerate.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > If I was a Microsoft or another enterprise tech company I’d hire a thousand engineers tomorrow to develop a Jira/Confluence competitor before the grace period for server licenses ends. Azure DevOps Server, née Visual Studio Team System, already exists.
  - tootie 6y ago
    TFS is the self-hosted predecessor to Azure DevOps and it absolutely sucks compared to JIRA.
    - AlphaSite 6y ago
      How can you be worse than JIRA? Thats almost impressive.
      - actuator 6y ago
Martin_Beck 6y ago
This 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 few years - "Next-Gen Projects" were so immature at launch they were useless, and have been incredibly slow to mature. So they need to focus their developers onto building features on the Cloud product codebase, but I am not hopeful that this means they'll actually ship features faster.
- x3n0ph3n3 6y ago
  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.
  - HarveyKandola 6y ago
    It's not easy unless you begin with that mind-set from day one. In fact, it gets tricky as you have "location-flagged" functionality depending upon Cloud or Self-hosted. We did this from scratch @ Documize by making (bold?) choices around deployment/runtime and database schema design for both SaaS and self-hosted "products": - run the exact same binary (we used Golang) - share/use the exact same database schema - data migration process the same for schema changes - support multi-tenanting: "enterprise" self-hosted also multi-tenanting so different teams/departments internally get different URLs - use the same "build" process to compile and ship Probably plenty more I could tell you!
    - x3n0ph3n3 6y ago
      I know it's not easy, but it's the only viable path form my experience. I ended up doing something similar, but taking our SaaS product and packaging it in a way that it could be run On-Prem. There was a really interesting feedback cycle where we wanted to make the On-Prem and SaaS deployments work as similarly as possible.
Spivak 6y ago
Ouch, on-prem software is a really tough business. I can kinda see why companies want out. Especially as they get bigger. Two of my former employers had to go through this hurdle of moving to SaaS from a an on-prem installation. * It's really hard to scale support. You end up being on the hook for why "it's not working" in thousands of different of environments you have zero control over. Anyone qualified to do that level of support could be making more money not hating their life. * Nobody wants to pay for updates. I mean it's totally rational but we also don't want to support $old_version forever. * Even when updates were free people still didn't do it. Telling your users "sorry you're using an ancient version, please update" just makes people angry. Again, understandable, but surprise! those same people suddenly weren't angry about updates once they were on our SaaS offering. Turns out that frog boiling is reasonably effective. * We had to deal with swaths of customer complaints about performance that we're mostly not our fault. Sorry our app is slow on 1/64th of a used SuperMicro. Maybe your IT department should get on GoFundMe?
- zaphirplane 6y ago
  > Telling your users "sorry you're using an ancient version, please update" just makes people angry I think telling people we support version x - y and facing a problem say try upgrading makes people angry Telling people we support version a - b and sorting out their issue is fine even when a-b is smaller than x-y I know support have it difficult because no one can be across all the bugs, regression and fixes, for multiple versions/configurations
- pc86 6y ago
  A lot of this seems to boil down to whether or not you're willing to "upset" your users. Yes, sometimes they do dumb shit. That doesn't mean you hang up on them, but "you're out of support and need to update. Call us back when you've updated" is a completely reasonable response, even if the update isn't free. "Your environment is below our minimum specs, you have to increase the hardware on that VM. Call us back when you've updated" is reasonable as well. I get that telling customers this kind of thing is hard, but sometimes it just has to be done.
- chillfox 6y ago
  "please update" is kinda the "try restarting" equivalent for sysadmins. And people get angry because it is usually delivered in a "I have no idea if it will work" kinda way. All you would have to do to make people calmly accept that they need to update is explaining why, so you know do the minimum and search the issue tracker so you can tell them that this is actually a known problem that was fixed in version x.y.z and updating will fix the problem.
justin_oaks 6y ago
Are 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.
- harrisonjackson 6y ago
  Self-hosted gitlab could probably get you some variation of all of these.
- momothereal 6y ago
  GitLab pretty much covers BitBucket (code), most of Bamboo (GitLab CI), maybe Jira if you use it only as a basic issue manager (forget about Agile stuff). Confluence is probably the hardest one. You could use any wiki software but the new "live-editing" stuff (Google Docs style) is pretty good for productivity. Hard to find an on-prem equivalent. Confluence's integration with Jira is hard to compare too.
  - schoolornot 6y ago
    I really wish MedisWiki was in a state that it could be rolled out as a replacement for Confluence. And in a lot of ways it can be. But sadly a lot of companies go the other way.
  - fredthomsen 6y ago
    Most of the places I know of or where friend's work use Atlassian. I am wondering if this will drive a shift towards GitLab considering the general consensus I've heard is that GitHub Enterprise is too expensive.
  - sytse 6y ago
    What agile stuff are you missing from the paid versions of GitLab? We have epics, roadmaps, milestones, and iterations. The only thing that is missing I can think of is workflow enforcement, but that doesn’t strike me as Agile.
xtracto 6y ago
I wonder what will happen with all the plugins that only worked on the "in premise" version of JIRA. I remember at some point going through the offering of plugins and a lot of them where only available for that version.
quest88 6y ago
What are their biggest products?
- pc86 6y ago
  https://www.atlassian.com/ https://www.atlassian.com/
  - quest88 6y ago
    Yes, they have many products. Which are the biggest?
- grumple 6y ago
  Jira is amongst the most popular workflow / ticketing systems. Probably number one. Bitbucket is top 3 git hosts. Confluence is one of the best wiki/knowledge base products. They also have some other products I’m less familiar with... but they are pretty big.
  - quest88 6y ago
    I knew the company was big, but I was specifically curious about their most successful / popular products.
justin_oaks 6y ago
I maintain server versions most of the self-hosted applications they're killing off. One thing I like about the server versions is the ability to spin up development versions of these applications so I can test out new plugins, version updates, or complicated configuration changes without affecting our production applications. So much for that. I guess I can skip that step and when it goes wrong in production I can be the old man who yells at "the cloud".
- originalvichy 6y ago
  Same here. Every org I work with has a dev environment we regularly refresh with production data. It’s great. If only they made the DC cheaper I wouldn’t be so disappointed.
Waterluvian 6y ago
I’ve abandoned Jira (cloud) at work so long as my manager continues to not care. It’s just painful. Brutally painful. Like 20MB download per use and everything takes forever to populate and there’s lag in everything I do. Atlassian feels like a bunch of individually purchased products that they then just jam together with integrations that never quite work the way they should. I wish my company would abandon it.
hamolton 6y ago
RIP defense community using Jira
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- MrMorden 6y ago
  Classified clouds are a thing. (Also national clouds for unclassified but export-controlled information.) https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/government/national-security https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/gove...
  - pmlnr 6y ago
    > Classified clouds That honestly sounds like an oxymoron.
  - Rebelgecko 6y ago
    From looking at Atlassian's website, it doesn't seem like they're doing anything that would be adequate for FOUO data, let alone classified
ThrowawayR2 6y ago
This is surprising; I would have expected a big press release for this sort of thing. Did the page go up early or something?
- Quarrel 6y ago
  You save the big press releases for announcements you're proud of.
- zeeZ 6y ago
  They have a blog post: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/journey-to-cloud https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/journey-to-clou... > To focus on the world-class cloud experience you deserve, we are simplifying our self-managed offerings.
lenkite 6y ago
I really hope this happens! My organisation will be certain to ditch JIRA and Confluence.
- anongoesprivate 6y ago
  +1
thijsr 6y ago
This 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?
- castillar76 6y ago
  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.
emddudley 6y ago
What is the path forward for companies that work with export controlled data, CUI, and classified information?
- MrMorden 6y ago
  AWS and Azure both have ITAR-compliant and classified cloud offerings.
- brodie 6y ago
  Use the Data Center offering? It wouldn’t surprise me if they eventually offer some kind of “segregated clouds”-type functionality.
sJ646U9k6c6gME9 6y ago
Thank goodness! The unicorn I work for will finally ditch JIRA and move on to something more user-friendly. What a relief.
- rst 6y ago
  If it's an SV Unicorn, it can probably afford the "Data Center" enterprise offering. Though from comments here, even that may not be a smooth migration from the a la carte on prem products, depending on what add-ons they use...
  - mdoar 6y ago
    Data center and server are the same bits using a different license. Moving from server to a one node data center Jira is not hard
    - kylecordes 6y ago
      Right, the change is fundamentally retiring the lower-priced single-node offering for small orgs. Likely their market understanding shows that organizations with sufficient motivation to stay away from the cloud are also mostly willing to use the higher-level Data Center offering. It's not only the same bits though, it add some extra enterprise-flavored features also.
- RikNieu 6y ago
  What specifically about JIRA annoys you?
awiesenhofer 6y ago
What are good self-hosted enterprise alternatives for Jira, Confluence, etc? Anyone got some recommendations?
g051051 6y ago
"We're forcing everyone into the cloud, and those that don't want to move will pay for the nose for the privilege of controlling their environment."
dagmx 6y ago
How does this play with the Australian ruling around state mandated backdoors and encryption bans? I can't imagine there's a lot of trust here for an Australian company providing cloud infrastructure that can be compelled to include back doors or locking out encryption? https://fee.org/articles/australia-s-unprecedented-encryption-law-is-a-threat-to-global-privacy/ https://fee.org/articles/australia-s-unprecedented-encryptio...
- joejerryronnie 6y ago
  I work in SaaS supporting global regulated markets. We’ve had to replicate full stack implementations hosted in local data centers and accessible only by citizens physically in that country with security clearance. I expect Atlassian (and other cloud companies) will need to do the same.
_where 6y ago
Calling it “moving to the cloud” has such pompous overtones. They stopped giving away access to their source for free, just like the majority of the rest of their community. Atlassian might as well be any other company now with a really good product suite. Years ago, they were awesome. They gave free licenses to open source projects. I still think they’re the best, but this cloud-only thing sucks. The software has value outside of their hosting it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tamasnet 6y ago
JetBrains YouTrack+TeamCity+Upsource might be an option for some folks. Hope they make a statement committing to their on-prem versions.
cordite 6y ago
JetBrains has some neat alternative products. I host YouTrack locally and it’s been helpful
- fra 6y ago
  Agreed - YouTrack is fantastic, and comes in both self-hosted ("Standalone") and cloud ("InCloud") versions.
1MachineElf 6y ago
My employer's national security agreement with the United States CFIUS requires software development in a data center on US soil where all security controls can be audited at any time by the government. Atlassian's JIRA is one of the tools in use for this. It could be a problem if on-prem is no longer offered by Atlassian.
- kylecordes 6y ago
  They are discontinuing the “Server” product, but continuing “Data Center”… which has more functionality at a higher price, suitable for bigger orgs. You might already be using Data Center, and be unaffected by the new announcement.
  - brodie 6y ago
    It’s surprising to me how many commenters on this post didn’t even read the announcement. When you see that their Data Center offering isn’t going anywhere, it doesn’t seem dire at all.
    - adamtulinius 6y ago
      It's taking a price hike, though.
    - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
      Their Data Center offering now starts at $40000 per year. This doesn't make sense unless you're already severely locked into Jira.
kstrauser 6y ago
Oh, perfect timing! Some coworkers were starting to consider Bamboo to replace Jenkins, but since our use case demands 100% on-prem, now I don’t have to waste my time evaluating it. We can throw it into the “inherently unfit for purpose” category and move on other products. If we’d bought Bamboo a month ago, I’d be ready to develop a temper.
RoyTyrell 6y ago
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.
- pldr1234 6y ago
  How did Confluence and Sharepoint compare? I'm curious (For context: I've only ever worked in BigCo's that used Confluence).
  - RoyTyrell 6y ago
    Sorry for the late reply. Sharepoint is god awful for anything Confluence is good at - namely being a wiki aimed at technical documentation. OneNote is a little better but even the online OneNote isn't great great, and both are a few steps backward in functionality.
jeff_redradish 6y ago
For any soon-to-be-ex Atlassian Server (self-hosted) customers, I've set up a Zulip server for discussing alternatives: https://chat.goodbyeserver.org/ 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-jira https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/6820/scriptrunner-for...
- chii 6y ago
  > open-source their discontinued Server product line little did you know, the source code for atlassian server products is already available for any paying customers. It's not FOSS, but if you need to run this yourself, and customize it, it's already possible. But of course, you will be responsible for keeping it updated (patching vulnerabilities from libraries etc).
  - jeff_redradish 6y ago
    I mean under an Open Source license, which the Atlassian Software License Agreement [1] is very far from being. It forbids you to even redistribute patches between licensees. [1] https://www.atlassian.com/legal/software-license-agreement https://www.atlassian.com/legal/software-license-agreement
  - laurent92 6y ago
thewebcount 6y ago
I 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.
- RikNieu 6y ago
  "If this gets my company to stop using them, I will be so happy." What specifically sucks about Jira and Confluence?
  - thewebcount 6y ago
    Just about everything. For Confluence, it's a complete mess. I can't find anything. When I log in, it shows me a page of irrelevant crap. It's something like "everything anyone in your group of hundreds of employees has written in the last 24 hours." So there's literally never been a single useful thing on the page after login. When I want to see the list of everything I've ever written, it only shows me the last month's worth. That important document that I need to update once a year? If I didn't "favorite" it, I have to use the search box and search the entire set of documents in my very large group. The text editing steals important keys for OS-wide functions. If you use Cmd-F to find something, instead of the browser's find feature coming up, Confluence steals it and puts up a much less useful find feature that doesn't actually find everything I need it to. I could go on for days about how awful Confluence is. I don't use Jira as much, but as far as I can tell, everything that comes out of Jira is incomprehensible. I get lots of emails from its CI system, and they never have any useful information. It might indicate that a build failed or some warning was present, but it doesn't say what in the email, and there's no link I can click on to take me right to the logs. I mean there's a link, and it shows me something that looks like a log, but I can't find the actual parts where it built our product or what the errors or warnings were. It's basically just a web page of terminal output. No formatting to make it more readable, etc. Why not just send me the log if you're not even going to format it? It's so bizarre.
aszen 6y ago
Doesn't seem like a good move, when we moved back to Bitbucket cloud from Bitbucket server we lost many essential features and ultimately decided to move to GitHub. We do still use Jira Cloud but while the UI and search is better the performance is just awful. Note that they do have a good vscode extension that integrates well with the development workflow, creating branches for tickets, commenting and so on. I use it to see issues, get notifications in vscode for new bugs and transition issues. It's good for viewing basic text but poor for media rich content. I also use the go-jira unofficial cli tool written in golang which is just a joy to configure and use. It supports a templating system for creating new issues and custom commands to do all kinds of tasks. https://github.com/go-jira/jira https://github.com/go-jira/jira Paired with GitHub Issues and PRs vscode extension, this enables me to work in the text editor most of the time.
0xUser 6y ago
Leave them feedback they deserve. https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact
- breakingcups 6y ago
  This is probably the best sink: https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact/contact-ceos https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact/contact-ceos
gardenrewind 6y ago
Crazy to do this when they don't yet offer a BAA for Atlassian cloud products, meaning you can't store PHI on their systems.
zamp7less 6y ago
This title is misleading. Atlassian will continue to sell and support their Data Center lineup, which are all on-premise products, so they are not moving to “cloud-only” as this title suggests. Now, this announcement will probably affect SMBs the most, as most large organizations, government agencies, etc are most likely already running Data Center and have left Server behind since it really isn’t scalable. I would’ve assumed that they would have just jacked up the price on Server to squeeze everyone out, but alas here we are.
- laurent92 6y ago
  The title isn’t misleading if you consider: - Customer must start with cloud, - Data Center is the overweight offering, starts with thousands of users, grossly overpriced like GitHub Enterprise.
  - zamp7less 6y ago
    What do you mean by “Customer must start with cloud”? You do not need to purchase their Cloud licenses to run any of their Data Center apps. And I never said Data Center was a good fit for everyone. The notion that they will not have any on-premise options is just simply not true though.
hnruss 6y ago
Switched from Jenkins to Bamboo Server about 5 years ago. The integrations with Bitbucket, Jira, and Slack have been really useful. My team has put a lot of time into getting the most out of Bamboo, so it’s disappointing that we won’t be able to continue to build on that. It would be nice if Atlassian open-sourced Bamboo so that we could continue using it long-term, but honestly one of the primary reasons that we’ve stuck with them is their excellent support team. Without them, our development team would be forced to diagnose and fix issues in Bamboo, which is not the best use of dev time. So I guess we’ll attempt to find alternative build software soon.
- InsaneOstrich 6y ago
  Do you think that you'll go back to Jenkins? I'm in the same situation that you are
  - hnruss 6y ago
    We’ll have to do some research and analysis. When we compare alternatives, product support will be one factor. There might be some commercial Jenkins support offerings out there, which would be interesting. It’s going to be a whole process that will take months to get right.
Fumtumi 6y ago
Jira is really a weird product; I'm using it for ages now and i have not seen any real features being added in the last 10 years and fundamental issues have not been adressed. The weirdest thing was their UI change a few years back where they thought it would be great to make core workflows 1 or 2 clicks further away than before. Like 'creating a ticket; went behind this plus button thing. Plenty of features i would love to see, the community votes them up as well but nothing happens. Apparently they are to busy with stuff no one is seeing. Hope that actually brings in innovation.
- loopz 6y ago
  Just the natural progression from UI to UX (clueless) design. The latter works to dumb down mobile interfaces, but wreak havoc in any complex interface.
- RikNieu 6y ago
  Do you have a link to some of the features you'd like to see?
hoppla 6y ago
So long Atlassian, and thanks for the fish!
tus88 6y ago
That's a pretty big deal.
madrox 6y ago
I’ve never once used cloud Jira at any of my jobs, so this move is a surprise. I wonder what’s driving it. Perhaps support costs of on-prem are high and it’s only the most legacy customers using it.
p2detar 6y ago
This sounds bad! We use 4 of their products on premises. We definitely can’t use Jira or Confluence in the cloud due to customer data privacy. I‘m eager to see what my bosses will decide.
isodude 6y ago
Could anyone buy it and then make it open source? So we can fix the code.
manicdee 6y ago
Data sovereignty means my 5,000 seat company will stop using it. Confluence and Jira were already a hard sell due to licence fees. Now Atlassian wants us to put our trade secrets on AWS or something? Not happening. At least they if we mess up security on a host inside our business it’s not the end of the world. edit: I don’t make the money decisions here, I am just a peon.
- i386 6y ago
  They are still selling their datacenter version.
  - waste_monk 6y ago
    The minimum seating for datacenter products is 500 users, with corresponding purchase and maintenance costs. It's simply not viable for small businesses who are unable to move to the cloud. For example, if my employer (for whom the use of cloud hosted service is simply not possible) wanted to keep using Atlassian products, moving to datacenter would cost us many thousands of dollars more per year in maintenance while wasting literally hundreds of unnecessary seats we'd be forced to pay for. This announcement has ruined my day. Not only will we have to abandon a number of projects to implement new Atlassian products, we'll have to start planning to migrate all of our existing instances to other products and re-build all the work flow and customisations in those. At least they've given a few years window for changeover, but this is going to generate a lot of work and our confluence power-users are going to be very upset at having to move to Sharepoint or some other horror.
    - ec109685 6y ago
      Is all that work worth saving 40k a year? https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/future-pricing/data-center-pricing/pricing-tables https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/future-pricing/data-cent...
      - manicdee 6y ago
        For some beancounters, the fact that that $40k opex turns into $400k in salaries used for non productive purposes is invisible.
emmelaich 6y ago
Not surprised. There was a time when they supported various java servers .. jetty, jboss, tomcat, others. That ended due to way too much support requirements. This is a step in the same direction. I wonder what institutions with a security restriction will do though. Market opportunity for some rival?
elliotpage 6y ago
I would guess that this move is because because their software runs like a bag of hammers falling down a flight of stairs and the last thing they want to deal with are your support calls about why their products dont work right. Don't get me wrong, they can work smoothly- just it takes an order of magnitude more work than you would expect / they would admit. To be slightly more charitable, this is a sensible move as at least this way Atlassian can control the end user experience and (perhaps!) have it not be utter trash. Far easier for them to manage this way.
- ratherbefuddled 6y ago
  It is trash on cloud, worse than server by a distance unfortunately.
barryvan 6y ago
This is very unfortunate, because in my experience the cloud offerings for JIRA and Confluence are orders of magnitude slower and more resource intensive, and BitBucket Cloud is very feature poor and workflow-compromised in comparison to its server counterpart.
pmlnr 6y ago
Everyone keeps only mentioning gitlab, whereas gitea[^1] has wiki, bug tracking, and git as well. No CI if I understand it correctly, but for the rest, it's there, and it's nice, and it's order of magnitudes faster and lighter. Then there's fossil[^2], which is brilliant, and is completely self-contained, with version controlling, wiki, etc. It's a bit awkward, but nonetheless feature full. [^1]: https://gitea.io/ https://gitea.io/ [^2]: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
chousuke 6y ago
I'm somewhat worried about what this means for our organisation. We use both Jira and Confluence, and while they have their issues, we've got many integrations that make life significantly better that will be work-intensive to convert to their cloud offering, if it's even possible. Our biggest complaint about Atlassian has always been the constantly rising price while value does not follow, and this might finally make them too expensive that we would be better served by alternatives, especially considering all the re-integration we would have to do in any case.
brunojppb 6y ago
Our org started using BitBucket cloud for a major project. The developer experience is light years behind Gitlab and Github. We are moving our entire pipeline to Gitlab instead. The difference in productivity and experience using Gitlab is shocking compared to Bitbucket. Their React app, while cool, is painfully slow, PR reviews are very clunky and there is no code highlighting on diffs.
dreamcompiler 6y ago
This sounds like a huge business opportunity for some YC startup to invent a better on-prem Jira.
variable11 6y ago
I'll be glad when we no longer have to use your unresponsive buggy software.
agustif 6y ago
Could an indie developer tackle this and try to offer a sane-replacement open source self-hosted jira alternative for small-medium orgs? Or it needs to be a big guy forcefully, as in nobody got fired for hiring IBM
- murgindrag 6y ago
  Or it could be indie commercial. I work for a shop which, due to regulatory reasons, cannot have some things live premises. I don't think it needs to be big guy, but it needs to be better than what else is out there. That's a high bar. There are plenty of good tools.
niffydroid 6y ago
I do wonder what atlassian do some days with their cloud offerings. I find they tend to muck about with the UI more than fixing bugs or new features. I tend to find we have downtime with pipelines a lot as well. Jira is ok, it can be slow. Confluence seems to be playing catch-up with notion. If I were to start a startup, I'd probably avoid atlassian.
MaulingMonkey 6y ago
Gamedev needs on-site VCS - we just have far too much VCS traffic for general internet links to handle. I mean, maybe you can build a microwave link directly to a datacenter Atlassian is using to host bitbucket... but no. To be fair, gamedev typically uses p4, not git, so maybe this doesn't have much impact there. Gamedev still sometimes resorts to at least partially airgapped networks, which is going to make VCS <-> JIRA integration a pain. I wonder if this will finally cause JIRA to get replaced in gamedev.
znpy 6y ago
This is probably a dick move that will cost Atlassian quite a bit in the future. For starters, the on-prem version is way faster than their cloud offering. We recently had this experience and their cloud version is nice and everything... But it's slow. Damn. Slow. Everything is slow. The UI is slow. Network requests are slow. Hardly bearable.
Aeolun 6y ago
Wow, I don’t think there’s any news Gitlab could have released themselves that would have been better for their sales.
ashtonkem 6y ago
Controversial take: good. Jira isn’t my favorite product for all the reasons everyone always gives. But the worst feature of Jira is the ability to install custom extensions that slow it down and fill it with bugs. My local Jira install takes seconds to reorder stories because we’ve loaded it to the hilt with god knows what. I’ve regularly crashed it due to innocuous actions like deleting a story due to extensions. Oh and we can’t use any automation tools with it (Zapier, IFTT) since it’s only accessible via VPN. Taking away the ability to customize Jira to death will make it a better project. Or it’ll force my org to move to something better: either is acceptable.
flarg 6y ago
We're using Jira on prem and it's pathetic in every sense, Google Docs and Sheets are better in all respects
0xdky 6y ago
> We have the technical know-how to administer data center versions of their products, but we can’t do shit... This is a very typical argument CIOs faced when transitioning storage to cloud. The job threat to storage admins created a lot of FUD and slowed many migrations. Unfortunately, this happened with DB, storage, compute and software. I wonder if there is a middle ground here where you can have a proxy service that can be run locally to augment and/or customize the product for a specific customer.
Bombthecat 6y ago
Aaaand our firm will stop using it... Oh well. We can't go cloud..
nojvek 6y ago
I get the benefits of SaaS. I get the benefits of hosting things in your own infra. Why can’t Atlassian licence their private docker images and allow companies to host things in their private cloud? Like why isn’t paying for docker images with k8s yaml files that you can host on your own cluster a thing ? I would pay for that.
simon04 6y ago
Recently, I've been taking a look at OpenProject https://www.openproject.org/ https://www.openproject.org/ (GNU General Public License version 3), wich provides a wiki, task management, bug tracker, project management, time tracking. I cannot share any experiences so far, but the project looks very promising. The release notes for the OpenProject 11.0.0 indicate that the project is actively maintained. Can anyone share her/his experiences with OpenProject?
- osfm8 6y ago
  I'm doing sysadmin roles using OpenProject 10.n and up, really enjoying it (also sysadmin a bunch of atlassian instances). Does the basic things well, with active development team behind it. Well worth a shakedown test to verify if fit-for-purpose for your needs.
voidmain0001 6y ago
The primary reason that the company I work for chose the Atlassian Confluence server licence was for LDAP integration with Active Directory. Yes, Atlassian supports SSO, but it requires Atlassian Access which costs $3/user/month. Further SSO with Access requires user management to be done within Access which is not the source of truth for this company as that privilege belongs to AD. Users are assigned to groups in AD, and group membership determines the access to Confluence sites, etc. Unless the cloud offering can provide similar functionality the server licence will die here, and be replaced by a product that can deliver these features.
grimblefasten 6y ago
I work for a large company that spends almost $1M/year with Atlassian and I’m the lead architect for our Dev tools infrastructure. On the one hand, I’m glad Atlassian has finally come clean on what’s obviously been their strategy for some time. On the other hand, it kinda sucks for customers like us. Yes, we’re a big company and yes, we run data center instances of some of the tools. But we’ve also got tons of smaller instances running around that basically have nowhere to go now. There are several industries that are incline to stay on premise: healthcare, legal, and financial software among others. We’re in that same boat. At the moment, I’m inclined to recommend we drop Atlassian altogether, for several reasons: First, Atlassian has never really understood the needs of large enterprises. They’ve recognized that we need performance and scalability and top level web security, but the rest of our large enterprise requiements remain largely unmet. Secondly, I haven’t seen any good organic development from Atlassian for a long time. They’ve bought a lot of other products and companies, but their ability to produce and deliver great features disappeared a long time ago. Finally, I have no confidence that Atlassian will keep the data center products going and properly maintain them. Something tells me they’ll do what’s necessary to keep too many customers from immediately jumping ship, but in the long run, I expect we’ll eventually see the end of life for the data center products just like they’ve done with the server products.
- RikNieu 6y ago
  "...but the rest of our large enterprise requiements remain largely unmet." What are some the unmet requirements?
  - grimblefasten 6y ago
    A lot of stuff around granular authorization controls and auditing - there’s a huge gulf in most of the atlassian products between a system admin and project admin and there’s a ton of admin actions that never show up in any audit trails or history within the app. Also: email handling sucks and support for the scaled agile model is pretty non-existent. Just in general though, take a look at jira.atlassian.com and see all the issues with thousands of votes that have been unresolved for years and years.
lixoaqui 6y ago
People are forgetting a very important point: server allows for more customizations/addons than cloud. It’s not just because companies want their data on prem. In my case it’s just because the level of costumization we want for confluence. Customer has money but it’s very hard to justify paying so much for the data center version. Really bad move from a company so invested in worsening their products over time.

380 points by ameshkov 6y ago

dqh 6y ago

We use Bitbucket server because we prefer the code review UI and the diff views over everything else. I was shocked when I tried the cloud version and saw how different and how much worse it was. Would otherwise actually prefer to move to cloud but not with that UI, will re-eval competitors instead.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
I don't know about the other products, but I was always told that Bitbucket is literally 2 separate products with unrelated codebases that Atlassian just branded the same. Take with a grain of salt because I have no good source, but consider that ex. on-prem BB never supported Mercurial (which was cloud BB's big selling point for me), and their UIs were quite different.
- brodie 6y ago
  I don’t know what the products are like today, but you’re right that they’ve historically been two separate products with totally different implementations.

TJSomething 6y ago

Dang. I actually like how customizable Jira's workflows are. What else is good at customizable Scrum-like workflows with custom fields?

joejerryronnie 6y ago
Check out TargetProcess
vaceletm 6y ago
I'm part of the dev team so take this comment with the level of distance you want but you should have a look at Tuleap [1]. You get the customization to yet another level as you are not constraint by the fact that templates are shared across your organization. You can tweak and customize every single tracker (issue type) with it's own fields & values without impacting others and without depending on an admin for that. You can deep dive with https://blog.tuleap.org/tuleap-versus-jira-software/ https://blog.tuleap.org/tuleap-versus-jira-software/ [1] https://www.tuleap.org/ https://www.tuleap.org/

hkchad 6y ago

Long time atlassian user, guess it was a good run but I'll be migrating to something else.

ggm 6y ago

Working with this product in contexts caught between on-premises, self-hosted cloud and fully outsource, with a tussle amongst the consumers/users, the payers and the operators, I predict more argument in my working life as we re-equipoise around this.

merb 6y ago

that looks like a killing blow.

ameshkov 6y ago

This just makes me extremely sad. Server products is what made us purchase Atlassian software. There are numerous reasons why our company (and a lot of other companies I presume) would like to avoid cloud. And if we really had to go cloud, I simply don't see why we would choose Atlassian over alternatives.

alelefant 6y ago
What are your companies reasons for avoiding cloud?

RantyDave 6y ago

Smells of opportunity to me.

petre 6y ago
Yup. But the alternatives have to be optionally containerized, easier to install maintain and upgrade. It's not 2009 any more.

Rebelgecko 6y ago

Wow. This must feel like a huge fuck-you to people that migrated to Atlassian because they could host things locally (I worked at a place that made the leap 3 years ago and it was a somewhat controversial decision. I feel kinda bad for everyone that'll be hearing an "I told you so" on Monday morning). Not only is the product being killed, they're raising the price during the migration period. Their FAQ also hints that even more price increases are coming. I imagine they'll lose a lot of customers that can't or won't send all of their data into the cloud

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
addicted 6y ago
And they are doing all of this while Microsoft is strengthening its competitive offerings.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
nikanj 6y ago
It's the Oracle playbook. F*ck customers, make money. Seems to work rather well, actually!
- swiley 6y ago
  This is why you always have to figure out what abandoning the software you pick would look like before you integrate into everything else.

barlo 6y ago

Following the Adobe playbook?

Jedd 6y ago

We'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 Confluence and Jira, just feels sluggish when doing bread and butter actions - adding a comment to a ticket or reloading a kanban view, loading a new page or opening the search dialog on Confluence. Yet, everything I've heard about the responsiveness of the 'cloud' offering is that it drives people to move to the on-prem server version.

originalvichy 6y ago
I don’t share the same experiences with slowness (maybe we do something right on the instances we manage). I do however experience slowness in cloud. I assume they increase cloud resources in some kinds of steps that make them appear extremely sluggish.
- confluence_perf 6y ago
  Sorry to hear it's been a frustrating experience. I'm a PM for Confluence Cloud and we're always trying to make it better. Would you be willing to share more specifics, such as: - Pages with content X are the slowest - Trying to do A/B/C is annoyingly slow - etc ?
  - vasco 6y ago
    Surely you have metrics?
    - Bombthecat 6y ago
      If your avarage is always 10 seconds, 7 is fast!
    - confluence_perf 6y ago
      Hi vasco, We have a lot of metrics, and we recognize that Confluence is not as fast or as good an experience as it should be. However nothing beats user feedback - hearing specific feedback from users may provide us with specific areas that we can focus our work, on top of the work we're already doing. If you have any feedback like that, we're hopeful you're willing to share it with us.

x87678r 6y ago

Anyone got a good opensource Jira alternative I can install locally? Most alternatives are cloud as well.

riffic 6y ago
Traditionally, redmine. Non-traditionally I'd say GitLab. Try looking here: https://alternativeto.net/software/jira/?license=opensource https://alternativeto.net/software/jira/?license=opensource
originalvichy 6y ago
Keep checking HN for the next week. I hope we see some good alternatives.
jasonv 6y ago
Anyone still use Trac? [https://trac.edgewall.org https://trac.edgewall.org] We were using it up until a while ago (edit: oh, did the math, 7 years ago)... could still totally get by with it. I keep my free Jira/Cloud account going, but when I look elsewhere, I don't really love the options either (Clubhouse, looking at you).
- 3np 6y ago
  To each their own I guess - Clubhouse has been a change for the better in every way compared to JIRA for me/us (cloud-only, though)
- user5994461 6y ago
  At the largest bank I worked with. Trac was the primary wiki that was in use for almost 15 years (largely abandoned for the last 5). Think 10 000 wiki pages and documents written by a thousand developers over the span of entire careers. Note that Trac is abandoned software, for example it cannot run on python 3, there's been issues filled on that for years and there's simply no effort to maintain it. I decommissioned it last year (hint: there's a long and painful migration story here). Users and documents have migrated to Sphinx, that's been actively used for the past 10 years and was always supposed to replace trac (hint: there's a longer story on how to handle or not handle a migration here). It looks really good but the markup and editing tool is not really user friendly. A few teams decided to move to the internal confluence instead, that's supposed to be the strategic solution in the company. Looks like they're up for another migration within 3 years.

failuser 6y ago

Will they launch a local-first fake competitor?

originalvichy 6y ago

This 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 several products at the same time effectively making it a money sink and impossible to justify to their budgeting. I would have been perfectly OK with DC taking over server with similar pricing, but this is just a monumentally idiotic greed-driven move. Now small-medium-large organizations are either forced to pay A LOT of money for self-hosting their highly protected data or either use their cloud. The latter is out of question for almost all of the organisations I know. If I was a Microsoft or another enterprise tech company I’d hire a thousand engineers tomorrow to develop a Jira/Confluence competitor before the grace period for server licenses ends. All that engineering money will pay itself back whent they can sell modern collab tools without tech debt from 15 years ago for a price we can tolerate.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> If I was a Microsoft or another enterprise tech company I’d hire a thousand engineers tomorrow to develop a Jira/Confluence competitor before the grace period for server licenses ends. Azure DevOps Server, née Visual Studio Team System, already exists.
- tootie 6y ago
  TFS is the self-hosted predecessor to Azure DevOps and it absolutely sucks compared to JIRA.
  - AlphaSite 6y ago
    How can you be worse than JIRA? Thats almost impressive.
    - actuator 6y ago

Martin_Beck 6y ago

This 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 few years - "Next-Gen Projects" were so immature at launch they were useless, and have been incredibly slow to mature. So they need to focus their developers onto building features on the Cloud product codebase, but I am not hopeful that this means they'll actually ship features faster.

x3n0ph3n3 6y ago
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.
- HarveyKandola 6y ago
  It's not easy unless you begin with that mind-set from day one. In fact, it gets tricky as you have "location-flagged" functionality depending upon Cloud or Self-hosted. We did this from scratch @ Documize by making (bold?) choices around deployment/runtime and database schema design for both SaaS and self-hosted "products": - run the exact same binary (we used Golang) - share/use the exact same database schema - data migration process the same for schema changes - support multi-tenanting: "enterprise" self-hosted also multi-tenanting so different teams/departments internally get different URLs - use the same "build" process to compile and ship Probably plenty more I could tell you!
  - x3n0ph3n3 6y ago
    I know it's not easy, but it's the only viable path form my experience. I ended up doing something similar, but taking our SaaS product and packaging it in a way that it could be run On-Prem. There was a really interesting feedback cycle where we wanted to make the On-Prem and SaaS deployments work as similarly as possible.

Spivak 6y ago

Ouch, on-prem software is a really tough business. I can kinda see why companies want out. Especially as they get bigger. Two of my former employers had to go through this hurdle of moving to SaaS from a an on-prem installation. * It's really hard to scale support. You end up being on the hook for why "it's not working" in thousands of different of environments you have zero control over. Anyone qualified to do that level of support could be making more money not hating their life. * Nobody wants to pay for updates. I mean it's totally rational but we also don't want to support $old_version forever. * Even when updates were free people still didn't do it. Telling your users "sorry you're using an ancient version, please update" just makes people angry. Again, understandable, but surprise! those same people suddenly weren't angry about updates once they were on our SaaS offering. Turns out that frog boiling is reasonably effective. * We had to deal with swaths of customer complaints about performance that we're mostly not our fault. Sorry our app is slow on 1/64th of a used SuperMicro. Maybe your IT department should get on GoFundMe?

zaphirplane 6y ago
> Telling your users "sorry you're using an ancient version, please update" just makes people angry I think telling people we support version x - y and facing a problem say try upgrading makes people angry Telling people we support version a - b and sorting out their issue is fine even when a-b is smaller than x-y I know support have it difficult because no one can be across all the bugs, regression and fixes, for multiple versions/configurations
pc86 6y ago
A lot of this seems to boil down to whether or not you're willing to "upset" your users. Yes, sometimes they do dumb shit. That doesn't mean you hang up on them, but "you're out of support and need to update. Call us back when you've updated" is a completely reasonable response, even if the update isn't free. "Your environment is below our minimum specs, you have to increase the hardware on that VM. Call us back when you've updated" is reasonable as well. I get that telling customers this kind of thing is hard, but sometimes it just has to be done.
chillfox 6y ago
"please update" is kinda the "try restarting" equivalent for sysadmins. And people get angry because it is usually delivered in a "I have no idea if it will work" kinda way. All you would have to do to make people calmly accept that they need to update is explaining why, so you know do the minimum and search the issue tracker so you can tell them that this is actually a known problem that was fixed in version x.y.z and updating will fix the problem.

justin_oaks 6y ago

Are 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.

harrisonjackson 6y ago
Self-hosted gitlab could probably get you some variation of all of these.
momothereal 6y ago
GitLab pretty much covers BitBucket (code), most of Bamboo (GitLab CI), maybe Jira if you use it only as a basic issue manager (forget about Agile stuff). Confluence is probably the hardest one. You could use any wiki software but the new "live-editing" stuff (Google Docs style) is pretty good for productivity. Hard to find an on-prem equivalent. Confluence's integration with Jira is hard to compare too.
- schoolornot 6y ago
  I really wish MedisWiki was in a state that it could be rolled out as a replacement for Confluence. And in a lot of ways it can be. But sadly a lot of companies go the other way.
- fredthomsen 6y ago
  Most of the places I know of or where friend's work use Atlassian. I am wondering if this will drive a shift towards GitLab considering the general consensus I've heard is that GitHub Enterprise is too expensive.
- sytse 6y ago
  What agile stuff are you missing from the paid versions of GitLab? We have epics, roadmaps, milestones, and iterations. The only thing that is missing I can think of is workflow enforcement, but that doesn’t strike me as Agile.

xtracto 6y ago

I wonder what will happen with all the plugins that only worked on the "in premise" version of JIRA. I remember at some point going through the offering of plugins and a lot of them where only available for that version.

quest88 6y ago

What are their biggest products?

pc86 6y ago
https://www.atlassian.com/ https://www.atlassian.com/
- quest88 6y ago
  Yes, they have many products. Which are the biggest?
grumple 6y ago
Jira is amongst the most popular workflow / ticketing systems. Probably number one. Bitbucket is top 3 git hosts. Confluence is one of the best wiki/knowledge base products. They also have some other products I’m less familiar with... but they are pretty big.
- quest88 6y ago
  I knew the company was big, but I was specifically curious about their most successful / popular products.

justin_oaks 6y ago

I maintain server versions most of the self-hosted applications they're killing off. One thing I like about the server versions is the ability to spin up development versions of these applications so I can test out new plugins, version updates, or complicated configuration changes without affecting our production applications. So much for that. I guess I can skip that step and when it goes wrong in production I can be the old man who yells at "the cloud".

originalvichy 6y ago
Same here. Every org I work with has a dev environment we regularly refresh with production data. It’s great. If only they made the DC cheaper I wouldn’t be so disappointed.

Waterluvian 6y ago

I’ve abandoned Jira (cloud) at work so long as my manager continues to not care. It’s just painful. Brutally painful. Like 20MB download per use and everything takes forever to populate and there’s lag in everything I do. Atlassian feels like a bunch of individually purchased products that they then just jam together with integrations that never quite work the way they should. I wish my company would abandon it.

hamolton 6y ago

RIP defense community using Jira

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
MrMorden 6y ago
Classified clouds are a thing. (Also national clouds for unclassified but export-controlled information.) https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/government/national-security https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/gove...
- pmlnr 6y ago
  > Classified clouds That honestly sounds like an oxymoron.
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  From looking at Atlassian's website, it doesn't seem like they're doing anything that would be adequate for FOUO data, let alone classified

ThrowawayR2 6y ago

This is surprising; I would have expected a big press release for this sort of thing. Did the page go up early or something?

Quarrel 6y ago
You save the big press releases for announcements you're proud of.
zeeZ 6y ago
They have a blog post: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/journey-to-cloud https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/journey-to-clou... > To focus on the world-class cloud experience you deserve, we are simplifying our self-managed offerings.

lenkite 6y ago

I really hope this happens! My organisation will be certain to ditch JIRA and Confluence.

anongoesprivate 6y ago
+1

thijsr 6y ago

This 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?

castillar76 6y ago
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.

emddudley 6y ago

What is the path forward for companies that work with export controlled data, CUI, and classified information?

MrMorden 6y ago
AWS and Azure both have ITAR-compliant and classified cloud offerings.
brodie 6y ago
Use the Data Center offering? It wouldn’t surprise me if they eventually offer some kind of “segregated clouds”-type functionality.

sJ646U9k6c6gME9 6y ago

Thank goodness! The unicorn I work for will finally ditch JIRA and move on to something more user-friendly. What a relief.

rst 6y ago
If it's an SV Unicorn, it can probably afford the "Data Center" enterprise offering. Though from comments here, even that may not be a smooth migration from the a la carte on prem products, depending on what add-ons they use...
- mdoar 6y ago
  Data center and server are the same bits using a different license. Moving from server to a one node data center Jira is not hard
  - kylecordes 6y ago
    Right, the change is fundamentally retiring the lower-priced single-node offering for small orgs. Likely their market understanding shows that organizations with sufficient motivation to stay away from the cloud are also mostly willing to use the higher-level Data Center offering. It's not only the same bits though, it add some extra enterprise-flavored features also.
RikNieu 6y ago
What specifically about JIRA annoys you?

awiesenhofer 6y ago

What are good self-hosted enterprise alternatives for Jira, Confluence, etc? Anyone got some recommendations?

g051051 6y ago

"We're forcing everyone into the cloud, and those that don't want to move will pay for the nose for the privilege of controlling their environment."

dagmx 6y ago

How does this play with the Australian ruling around state mandated backdoors and encryption bans? I can't imagine there's a lot of trust here for an Australian company providing cloud infrastructure that can be compelled to include back doors or locking out encryption? https://fee.org/articles/australia-s-unprecedented-encryption-law-is-a-threat-to-global-privacy/ https://fee.org/articles/australia-s-unprecedented-encryptio...

joejerryronnie 6y ago
I work in SaaS supporting global regulated markets. We’ve had to replicate full stack implementations hosted in local data centers and accessible only by citizens physically in that country with security clearance. I expect Atlassian (and other cloud companies) will need to do the same.

_where 6y ago

Calling it “moving to the cloud” has such pompous overtones. They stopped giving away access to their source for free, just like the majority of the rest of their community. Atlassian might as well be any other company now with a really good product suite. Years ago, they were awesome. They gave free licenses to open source projects. I still think they’re the best, but this cloud-only thing sucks. The software has value outside of their hosting it.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tamasnet 6y ago

JetBrains YouTrack+TeamCity+Upsource might be an option for some folks. Hope they make a statement committing to their on-prem versions.

cordite 6y ago

JetBrains has some neat alternative products. I host YouTrack locally and it’s been helpful

fra 6y ago
Agreed - YouTrack is fantastic, and comes in both self-hosted ("Standalone") and cloud ("InCloud") versions.

1MachineElf 6y ago

My employer's national security agreement with the United States CFIUS requires software development in a data center on US soil where all security controls can be audited at any time by the government. Atlassian's JIRA is one of the tools in use for this. It could be a problem if on-prem is no longer offered by Atlassian.

kylecordes 6y ago
They are discontinuing the “Server” product, but continuing “Data Center”… which has more functionality at a higher price, suitable for bigger orgs. You might already be using Data Center, and be unaffected by the new announcement.
- brodie 6y ago
  It’s surprising to me how many commenters on this post didn’t even read the announcement. When you see that their Data Center offering isn’t going anywhere, it doesn’t seem dire at all.
  - adamtulinius 6y ago
    It's taking a price hike, though.
  - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
    Their Data Center offering now starts at $40000 per year. This doesn't make sense unless you're already severely locked into Jira.

kstrauser 6y ago

Oh, perfect timing! Some coworkers were starting to consider Bamboo to replace Jenkins, but since our use case demands 100% on-prem, now I don’t have to waste my time evaluating it. We can throw it into the “inherently unfit for purpose” category and move on other products. If we’d bought Bamboo a month ago, I’d be ready to develop a temper.

RoyTyrell 6y ago

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.

pldr1234 6y ago
How did Confluence and Sharepoint compare? I'm curious (For context: I've only ever worked in BigCo's that used Confluence).
- RoyTyrell 6y ago
  Sorry for the late reply. Sharepoint is god awful for anything Confluence is good at - namely being a wiki aimed at technical documentation. OneNote is a little better but even the online OneNote isn't great great, and both are a few steps backward in functionality.

jeff_redradish 6y ago

For any soon-to-be-ex Atlassian Server (self-hosted) customers, I've set up a Zulip server for discussing alternatives: https://chat.goodbyeserver.org/ 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-jira https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/6820/scriptrunner-for...

chii 6y ago
> open-source their discontinued Server product line little did you know, the source code for atlassian server products is already available for any paying customers. It's not FOSS, but if you need to run this yourself, and customize it, it's already possible. But of course, you will be responsible for keeping it updated (patching vulnerabilities from libraries etc).
- jeff_redradish 6y ago
  I mean under an Open Source license, which the Atlassian Software License Agreement [1] is very far from being. It forbids you to even redistribute patches between licensees. [1] https://www.atlassian.com/legal/software-license-agreement https://www.atlassian.com/legal/software-license-agreement
- laurent92 6y ago

thewebcount 6y ago

I 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.

RikNieu 6y ago
"If this gets my company to stop using them, I will be so happy." What specifically sucks about Jira and Confluence?
- thewebcount 6y ago
  Just about everything. For Confluence, it's a complete mess. I can't find anything. When I log in, it shows me a page of irrelevant crap. It's something like "everything anyone in your group of hundreds of employees has written in the last 24 hours." So there's literally never been a single useful thing on the page after login. When I want to see the list of everything I've ever written, it only shows me the last month's worth. That important document that I need to update once a year? If I didn't "favorite" it, I have to use the search box and search the entire set of documents in my very large group. The text editing steals important keys for OS-wide functions. If you use Cmd-F to find something, instead of the browser's find feature coming up, Confluence steals it and puts up a much less useful find feature that doesn't actually find everything I need it to. I could go on for days about how awful Confluence is. I don't use Jira as much, but as far as I can tell, everything that comes out of Jira is incomprehensible. I get lots of emails from its CI system, and they never have any useful information. It might indicate that a build failed or some warning was present, but it doesn't say what in the email, and there's no link I can click on to take me right to the logs. I mean there's a link, and it shows me something that looks like a log, but I can't find the actual parts where it built our product or what the errors or warnings were. It's basically just a web page of terminal output. No formatting to make it more readable, etc. Why not just send me the log if you're not even going to format it? It's so bizarre.

aszen 6y ago

Doesn't seem like a good move, when we moved back to Bitbucket cloud from Bitbucket server we lost many essential features and ultimately decided to move to GitHub. We do still use Jira Cloud but while the UI and search is better the performance is just awful. Note that they do have a good vscode extension that integrates well with the development workflow, creating branches for tickets, commenting and so on. I use it to see issues, get notifications in vscode for new bugs and transition issues. It's good for viewing basic text but poor for media rich content. I also use the go-jira unofficial cli tool written in golang which is just a joy to configure and use. It supports a templating system for creating new issues and custom commands to do all kinds of tasks. https://github.com/go-jira/jira https://github.com/go-jira/jira Paired with GitHub Issues and PRs vscode extension, this enables me to work in the text editor most of the time.

0xUser 6y ago

Leave them feedback they deserve. https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact

breakingcups 6y ago
This is probably the best sink: https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact/contact-ceos https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact/contact-ceos

gardenrewind 6y ago

Crazy to do this when they don't yet offer a BAA for Atlassian cloud products, meaning you can't store PHI on their systems.

zamp7less 6y ago

This title is misleading. Atlassian will continue to sell and support their Data Center lineup, which are all on-premise products, so they are not moving to “cloud-only” as this title suggests. Now, this announcement will probably affect SMBs the most, as most large organizations, government agencies, etc are most likely already running Data Center and have left Server behind since it really isn’t scalable. I would’ve assumed that they would have just jacked up the price on Server to squeeze everyone out, but alas here we are.

laurent92 6y ago
The title isn’t misleading if you consider: - Customer must start with cloud, - Data Center is the overweight offering, starts with thousands of users, grossly overpriced like GitHub Enterprise.
- zamp7less 6y ago
  What do you mean by “Customer must start with cloud”? You do not need to purchase their Cloud licenses to run any of their Data Center apps. And I never said Data Center was a good fit for everyone. The notion that they will not have any on-premise options is just simply not true though.

hnruss 6y ago

Switched from Jenkins to Bamboo Server about 5 years ago. The integrations with Bitbucket, Jira, and Slack have been really useful. My team has put a lot of time into getting the most out of Bamboo, so it’s disappointing that we won’t be able to continue to build on that. It would be nice if Atlassian open-sourced Bamboo so that we could continue using it long-term, but honestly one of the primary reasons that we’ve stuck with them is their excellent support team. Without them, our development team would be forced to diagnose and fix issues in Bamboo, which is not the best use of dev time. So I guess we’ll attempt to find alternative build software soon.

InsaneOstrich 6y ago
Do you think that you'll go back to Jenkins? I'm in the same situation that you are
- hnruss 6y ago
  We’ll have to do some research and analysis. When we compare alternatives, product support will be one factor. There might be some commercial Jenkins support offerings out there, which would be interesting. It’s going to be a whole process that will take months to get right.

Fumtumi 6y ago

Jira is really a weird product; I'm using it for ages now and i have not seen any real features being added in the last 10 years and fundamental issues have not been adressed. The weirdest thing was their UI change a few years back where they thought it would be great to make core workflows 1 or 2 clicks further away than before. Like 'creating a ticket; went behind this plus button thing. Plenty of features i would love to see, the community votes them up as well but nothing happens. Apparently they are to busy with stuff no one is seeing. Hope that actually brings in innovation.

loopz 6y ago
Just the natural progression from UI to UX (clueless) design. The latter works to dumb down mobile interfaces, but wreak havoc in any complex interface.
RikNieu 6y ago
Do you have a link to some of the features you'd like to see?

hoppla 6y ago

So long Atlassian, and thanks for the fish!

tus88 6y ago

That's a pretty big deal.

madrox 6y ago

I’ve never once used cloud Jira at any of my jobs, so this move is a surprise. I wonder what’s driving it. Perhaps support costs of on-prem are high and it’s only the most legacy customers using it.

p2detar 6y ago

This sounds bad! We use 4 of their products on premises. We definitely can’t use Jira or Confluence in the cloud due to customer data privacy. I‘m eager to see what my bosses will decide.

isodude 6y ago

Could anyone buy it and then make it open source? So we can fix the code.

manicdee 6y ago

Data sovereignty means my 5,000 seat company will stop using it. Confluence and Jira were already a hard sell due to licence fees. Now Atlassian wants us to put our trade secrets on AWS or something? Not happening. At least they if we mess up security on a host inside our business it’s not the end of the world. edit: I don’t make the money decisions here, I am just a peon.

i386 6y ago
They are still selling their datacenter version.
- waste_monk 6y ago
  The minimum seating for datacenter products is 500 users, with corresponding purchase and maintenance costs. It's simply not viable for small businesses who are unable to move to the cloud. For example, if my employer (for whom the use of cloud hosted service is simply not possible) wanted to keep using Atlassian products, moving to datacenter would cost us many thousands of dollars more per year in maintenance while wasting literally hundreds of unnecessary seats we'd be forced to pay for. This announcement has ruined my day. Not only will we have to abandon a number of projects to implement new Atlassian products, we'll have to start planning to migrate all of our existing instances to other products and re-build all the work flow and customisations in those. At least they've given a few years window for changeover, but this is going to generate a lot of work and our confluence power-users are going to be very upset at having to move to Sharepoint or some other horror.
  - ec109685 6y ago
    Is all that work worth saving 40k a year? https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/future-pricing/data-center-pricing/pricing-tables https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/future-pricing/data-cent...
    - manicdee 6y ago
      For some beancounters, the fact that that $40k opex turns into $400k in salaries used for non productive purposes is invisible.

emmelaich 6y ago

Not surprised. There was a time when they supported various java servers .. jetty, jboss, tomcat, others. That ended due to way too much support requirements. This is a step in the same direction. I wonder what institutions with a security restriction will do though. Market opportunity for some rival?

elliotpage 6y ago

I would guess that this move is because because their software runs like a bag of hammers falling down a flight of stairs and the last thing they want to deal with are your support calls about why their products dont work right. Don't get me wrong, they can work smoothly- just it takes an order of magnitude more work than you would expect / they would admit. To be slightly more charitable, this is a sensible move as at least this way Atlassian can control the end user experience and (perhaps!) have it not be utter trash. Far easier for them to manage this way.

ratherbefuddled 6y ago
It is trash on cloud, worse than server by a distance unfortunately.

barryvan 6y ago

This is very unfortunate, because in my experience the cloud offerings for JIRA and Confluence are orders of magnitude slower and more resource intensive, and BitBucket Cloud is very feature poor and workflow-compromised in comparison to its server counterpart.

pmlnr 6y ago

Everyone keeps only mentioning gitlab, whereas gitea[^1] has wiki, bug tracking, and git as well. No CI if I understand it correctly, but for the rest, it's there, and it's nice, and it's order of magnitudes faster and lighter. Then there's fossil[^2], which is brilliant, and is completely self-contained, with version controlling, wiki, etc. It's a bit awkward, but nonetheless feature full. [^1]: https://gitea.io/ https://gitea.io/ [^2]: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki

chousuke 6y ago

I'm somewhat worried about what this means for our organisation. We use both Jira and Confluence, and while they have their issues, we've got many integrations that make life significantly better that will be work-intensive to convert to their cloud offering, if it's even possible. Our biggest complaint about Atlassian has always been the constantly rising price while value does not follow, and this might finally make them too expensive that we would be better served by alternatives, especially considering all the re-integration we would have to do in any case.

brunojppb 6y ago

Our org started using BitBucket cloud for a major project. The developer experience is light years behind Gitlab and Github. We are moving our entire pipeline to Gitlab instead. The difference in productivity and experience using Gitlab is shocking compared to Bitbucket. Their React app, while cool, is painfully slow, PR reviews are very clunky and there is no code highlighting on diffs.

dreamcompiler 6y ago

This sounds like a huge business opportunity for some YC startup to invent a better on-prem Jira.

variable11 6y ago

I'll be glad when we no longer have to use your unresponsive buggy software.

agustif 6y ago

Could an indie developer tackle this and try to offer a sane-replacement open source self-hosted jira alternative for small-medium orgs? Or it needs to be a big guy forcefully, as in nobody got fired for hiring IBM

murgindrag 6y ago
Or it could be indie commercial. I work for a shop which, due to regulatory reasons, cannot have some things live premises. I don't think it needs to be big guy, but it needs to be better than what else is out there. That's a high bar. There are plenty of good tools.

niffydroid 6y ago

I do wonder what atlassian do some days with their cloud offerings. I find they tend to muck about with the UI more than fixing bugs or new features. I tend to find we have downtime with pipelines a lot as well. Jira is ok, it can be slow. Confluence seems to be playing catch-up with notion. If I were to start a startup, I'd probably avoid atlassian.

MaulingMonkey 6y ago

Gamedev needs on-site VCS - we just have far too much VCS traffic for general internet links to handle. I mean, maybe you can build a microwave link directly to a datacenter Atlassian is using to host bitbucket... but no. To be fair, gamedev typically uses p4, not git, so maybe this doesn't have much impact there. Gamedev still sometimes resorts to at least partially airgapped networks, which is going to make VCS <-> JIRA integration a pain. I wonder if this will finally cause JIRA to get replaced in gamedev.

znpy 6y ago

This is probably a dick move that will cost Atlassian quite a bit in the future. For starters, the on-prem version is way faster than their cloud offering. We recently had this experience and their cloud version is nice and everything... But it's slow. Damn. Slow. Everything is slow. The UI is slow. Network requests are slow. Hardly bearable.

Aeolun 6y ago

Wow, I don’t think there’s any news Gitlab could have released themselves that would have been better for their sales.

ashtonkem 6y ago

Controversial take: good. Jira isn’t my favorite product for all the reasons everyone always gives. But the worst feature of Jira is the ability to install custom extensions that slow it down and fill it with bugs. My local Jira install takes seconds to reorder stories because we’ve loaded it to the hilt with god knows what. I’ve regularly crashed it due to innocuous actions like deleting a story due to extensions. Oh and we can’t use any automation tools with it (Zapier, IFTT) since it’s only accessible via VPN. Taking away the ability to customize Jira to death will make it a better project. Or it’ll force my org to move to something better: either is acceptable.

flarg 6y ago

We're using Jira on prem and it's pathetic in every sense, Google Docs and Sheets are better in all respects

0xdky 6y ago

> We have the technical know-how to administer data center versions of their products, but we can’t do shit... This is a very typical argument CIOs faced when transitioning storage to cloud. The job threat to storage admins created a lot of FUD and slowed many migrations. Unfortunately, this happened with DB, storage, compute and software. I wonder if there is a middle ground here where you can have a proxy service that can be run locally to augment and/or customize the product for a specific customer.

Bombthecat 6y ago

Aaaand our firm will stop using it... Oh well. We can't go cloud..

nojvek 6y ago

I get the benefits of SaaS. I get the benefits of hosting things in your own infra. Why can’t Atlassian licence their private docker images and allow companies to host things in their private cloud? Like why isn’t paying for docker images with k8s yaml files that you can host on your own cluster a thing ? I would pay for that.

simon04 6y ago

Recently, I've been taking a look at OpenProject https://www.openproject.org/ https://www.openproject.org/ (GNU General Public License version 3), wich provides a wiki, task management, bug tracker, project management, time tracking. I cannot share any experiences so far, but the project looks very promising. The release notes for the OpenProject 11.0.0 indicate that the project is actively maintained. Can anyone share her/his experiences with OpenProject?

osfm8 6y ago
I'm doing sysadmin roles using OpenProject 10.n and up, really enjoying it (also sysadmin a bunch of atlassian instances). Does the basic things well, with active development team behind it. Well worth a shakedown test to verify if fit-for-purpose for your needs.

voidmain0001 6y ago

The primary reason that the company I work for chose the Atlassian Confluence server licence was for LDAP integration with Active Directory. Yes, Atlassian supports SSO, but it requires Atlassian Access which costs $3/user/month. Further SSO with Access requires user management to be done within Access which is not the source of truth for this company as that privilege belongs to AD. Users are assigned to groups in AD, and group membership determines the access to Confluence sites, etc. Unless the cloud offering can provide similar functionality the server licence will die here, and be replaced by a product that can deliver these features.

grimblefasten 6y ago

I work for a large company that spends almost $1M/year with Atlassian and I’m the lead architect for our Dev tools infrastructure. On the one hand, I’m glad Atlassian has finally come clean on what’s obviously been their strategy for some time. On the other hand, it kinda sucks for customers like us. Yes, we’re a big company and yes, we run data center instances of some of the tools. But we’ve also got tons of smaller instances running around that basically have nowhere to go now. There are several industries that are incline to stay on premise: healthcare, legal, and financial software among others. We’re in that same boat. At the moment, I’m inclined to recommend we drop Atlassian altogether, for several reasons: First, Atlassian has never really understood the needs of large enterprises. They’ve recognized that we need performance and scalability and top level web security, but the rest of our large enterprise requiements remain largely unmet. Secondly, I haven’t seen any good organic development from Atlassian for a long time. They’ve bought a lot of other products and companies, but their ability to produce and deliver great features disappeared a long time ago. Finally, I have no confidence that Atlassian will keep the data center products going and properly maintain them. Something tells me they’ll do what’s necessary to keep too many customers from immediately jumping ship, but in the long run, I expect we’ll eventually see the end of life for the data center products just like they’ve done with the server products.

RikNieu 6y ago
"...but the rest of our large enterprise requiements remain largely unmet." What are some the unmet requirements?
- grimblefasten 6y ago
  A lot of stuff around granular authorization controls and auditing - there’s a huge gulf in most of the atlassian products between a system admin and project admin and there’s a ton of admin actions that never show up in any audit trails or history within the app. Also: email handling sucks and support for the scaled agile model is pretty non-existent. Just in general though, take a look at jira.atlassian.com and see all the issues with thousands of votes that have been unresolved for years and years.

lixoaqui 6y ago

People are forgetting a very important point: server allows for more customizations/addons than cloud. It’s not just because companies want their data on prem. In my case it’s just because the level of costumization we want for confluence. Customer has money but it’s very hard to justify paying so much for the data center version. Really bad move from a company so invested in worsening their products over time.