Atlassian Backs AWS for Its Data Center Editions -- AWSInsider

Atlassian Backs AWS for Its Data Center Editions

By John K. Waters
10/18/2016

The Data Center editions of two of software firm Atlassian's core products, JIRA Software and BitBucket, now feature native support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) deployments.

Atlassian made the announcements last week during its annual Atlassian Summit user conference in San Jose, Calif. The company also said it plans to add similar support for other Data Center editions in the future.

Sydney, Australia-based Atlassian introduced the Data Center deployment option two years ago to provide high availability and instant scalability to customers hosting Atlassian's primary applications in their own datacenters. The lineup of Data Center editions also includes Confluence Data Center and JIRA Service Desk Data Center, and the company just announced the beta release of a Data Center edition of its HipChat messaging service.

The company acquired HipChat in 2012 and released HipChat Server three years later. HipChat Server is designed to be deployed on a single node, but the Data Center edition works across multiple nodes and can accommodate teams larger than 5,000 users.

Atlassian also announced support for SAML 2.0 for secure single sign-on (SSO) across all Data Center editions of its products. Admins will be able to specify a provider of the XML-based, open-standard data format to manage user authentication, Deatsch explained. The company currently supports a number of ID management providers, including Okta, OneLogin, Azure, Active Directory, Bitium and PingOne.

The two companies will be providing Quick Start guides powered by AWS CloudFormation templates for the Data Center edition Atlassian apps. Customers can use the guides to deploy a Data Center cluster, including load balancers, databases and all required connectivity. The guides include configuration steps and best practices for using AWS auto-scaling and instant provisioning.

"More and more organizations are turning to infrastructure service providers for a cost effective and flexible alternative to hosting on traditional servers," said Cameron Deatsch, Head of Marketing in Atlassian's Server group, in a blog post. "In fact, the percentage of Atlassian instances in production on AWS doubled over the last three years."

Atlassian also announced a new capability for JIRA Software Data Center: rolling upgrades with zero downtime.

The collaboration tools provider is best known for its flagship JIRA issue tracker and project manager software. Last year, the company split the open source project into three stand-along products running on a common platform: JIRA Software, for Agile development teams; JIRA Service Desk, which provides a user-focused service desk for IT and other service teams; and the JIRA Core business management software. BitBucket is a distributed version control system based on Git. Confluence is the company's team collaboration platform.

About the Author

John K. Waters is the editor in chief of a number of Converge360.com sites, with a focus on high-end development, AI and future tech. He's been writing about cutting-edge technologies and culture of Silicon Valley for more than two decades, and he's written more than a dozen books. He also co-scripted the documentary film Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance, which aired on PBS. He can be reached at jwaters@converge360.com.