This sounds like a terrible move and will probably force all medium-size organizations I work with to ditch Atlassian.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I would have been perfectly OK with DC taking over server with similar pricing, but this is just a monumentally idiotic greed-driven move.<p>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.<p>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.
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).<p>Not only is the product being killed, they're <i>raising the price</i> 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 <i>the cloud</i>
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>But rather, regular usage, especially of Confluence and Jira, just feels <i>sluggish</i> 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.<p>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.
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.<p>* 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.<p>* Nobody wants to pay for updates. I mean it's totally rational but we also don't want to support $old_version forever.<p>* 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.<p>* 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?
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.
For any soon-to-be-ex Atlassian Server (self-hosted) customers, I've set up a Zulip server for discussing alternatives:<p><a href="https://chat.goodbyeserver.org/" rel="nofollow">https://chat.goodbyeserver.org/</a><p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/6820/scriptrunner-for-jira" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/6820/scriptrunner-for...</a>
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.
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.<p>At least they if we mess up security on a host inside our business it’s not the end of the world.<p>edit: I don’t make the money decisions here, I am just a peon.
This just makes me extremely sad.<p>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.
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?
Are there good self-hosted alternatives for those of use who'd like to get off of Atlassian products?<p>For Bamboo, I immediately think of Jenkins, although it's showing its age now.<p>For Confluence, I think of Media Wiki.<p>For BitBucket, I think of self-hosted GitLab.<p>Not sure about Jira or Service Desk, though.<p>I'd appreciate any better suggestions.
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?<p><a href="https://fee.org/articles/australia-s-unprecedented-encryption-law-is-a-threat-to-global-privacy/" rel="nofollow">https://fee.org/articles/australia-s-unprecedented-encryptio...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>I wish my company would abandon it.
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.<p>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.
I maintain server versions most of the self-hosted applications they're killing off.<p>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.<p>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".
Jira is really a weird product;<p>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.<p>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.<p>Like 'creating a ticket; went behind this plus button thing.<p>Plenty of features i would love to see, the community votes them up as well but nothing happens.<p>Apparently they are to busy with stuff no one is seeing. Hope that actually brings in innovation.
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.<p>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.<p>[^1]: <a href="https://gitea.io/" rel="nofollow">https://gitea.io/</a><p>[^2]: <a href="https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki" rel="nofollow">https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki</a>
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.<p>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.
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 <i>significantly</i> better that will be work-intensive to convert to their cloud offering, if it's even possible.<p>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.
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.<p>We do still use Jira Cloud but while the UI and search is better the performance is just awful.<p>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.<p>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.
<a href="https://github.com/go-jira/jira" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/go-jira/jira</a><p>Paired with GitHub Issues and PRs vscode extension, this enables me to work in the text editor most of the time.
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.<p>If we’d bought Bamboo a month ago, I’d be ready to develop a temper.
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.
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.
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.<p>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.
Recently, I've been taking a look at OpenProject <a href="https://www.openproject.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.openproject.org/</a> (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?
I work for a large company that spends almost $1M/year with Atlassian and I’m the lead architect for our Dev tools infrastructure.<p>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.<p>At the moment, I’m inclined to recommend we drop Atlassian altogether, for several reasons:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
Leave them feedback they deserve.
<a href="https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact" rel="nofollow">https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact</a>
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.
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.
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.<p>Jira is ok, it can be slow. Confluence seems to be playing catch-up with notion.<p>If I were to start a startup, I'd probably avoid atlassian.
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.
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.<p>This is a step in the same direction.<p>I wonder what institutions with a security restriction will do though.<p>Market opportunity for some rival?
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.
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.
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.
Controversial take: good.<p>Jira isn’t my favorite product for all the reasons everyone always gives. But the <i>worst</i> 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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
> We have the technical know-how to administer data center versions of their products, but we can’t do shit...<p>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.<p>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.
"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."
People are forgetting a very important point: server allows for more customizations/addons than cloud.<p>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.<p>Customer has money but it’s very hard to justify paying so much for the data center version.<p>Really bad move from a company so invested in worsening their products over time.
This is probably a dick move that will cost Atlassian quite a bit in the future.<p>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.
I get the benefits of SaaS. I get the benefits of hosting things in your own infra.<p>Why can’t Atlassian licence their private docker images and allow companies to host things in their private cloud?<p>Like why isn’t paying for docker images with k8s yaml files that you can host on your own cluster a thing ?<p>I would pay for that.
Could an indie developer tackle this and try to offer a sane-replacement open source self-hosted jira alternative for small-medium orgs?<p>Or it needs to be a big guy forcefully, as in nobody got fired for hiring IBM
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.