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

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.

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

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.

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.

* 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?

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...

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.

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.

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.

https://fee.org/articles/australia-s-unprecedented-encryptio...

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.

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.

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".

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.

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/

[^2]: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki

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.

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.

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

Paired with GitHub Issues and PRs vscode extension, this enables me to work in the text editor most of the time.

If we’d bought Bamboo a month ago, I’d be ready to develop a temper.

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.

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.

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.

This is a step in the same direction.

I wonder what institutions with a security restriction will do though.

Market opportunity for some rival?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Or it needs to be a big guy forcefully, as in nobody got fired for hiring IBM