Jira on premises end of life starts feb 2021
atlassian.com
atlassian.com
> It's On February 2, 2021 PT, we will stop selling new licenses for our server products and cease new feature development in our server product line...maintenance and support for an additional three years, ending February 2, 2024 PT.
> Even with three years to prepare for these changes, we understand that not every customer will be ready to make the switch from our server products to our cloud products. For these customers, we'll continue to offer our self-managed enterprise edition, Data Center.
Frankly, I have no idea what they'll do because so many plugins can only work with their on-prem API.
https://www.atlassian.com/blog/jira-software/server-vs-data-...
plugins that were certified for server will now complain (but should still work albiet unsupportedly) if they're not recertified for data center, and occasionally you have to buy a license for a plugin that you had for server because they made a certified version for data center, but otherwise the software looks feels and acts the same as before.
JIRA Server licenses are perpetual. You only pay if you want upgrades.
I've seen companies running JIRA from 2009.
2. You might be committing criminal copyright violation;
3. The most obvious countermeasure is to write something to detect whether the software stops phoning home and use it to trigger an investigation.
It was ridiculously easy assuming you know how a java decompiler works. One JAR needed to be patched and re-compiled, which is a trivial process if you know how classpaths work.
There are plenty of libraries out there to facilitate this such as Javassist or Apache BCEL, and lots of legitimate uses (AOP, instrumentation, etc).
Favorite self-hosted alternatives? Bonus points if they can import from Jira preserving issue numbers?
I also think that this is the true reason why Atlassian is doing this. The complexity of Jira has become to much, so now they will fix the problem by forcing smaller customers into a more defined workflow, while ensuring that those who require customization are also able to pay for training and consultance.
Why not use Phabricator?
There is a catch though - we use it only as a code review platform. It always seemed to be focused on that part more than in any other. I'm not saying everything else is bad, it just a gut feeling that code review always got the maximum attention.
And another catch is that it seems they lost their momentum even in this area. I recall times when we waited for weekly status update to see if there is something we'd have as excuse for an upgrade. Now it's even not a weekly update and speed of development seems to be slow.
I did a pretty thorough evaluation once which included Phrabricator, it came out very well, especially the work flow around code review. It wasn't chosen for unrelated reasons.
I don't know why it isn't more popular than it is. It seems to be very mature, certainly better than a lot of tools that organizations pay good money for.
It led me to start writing an Elm client for their API, and although a lot of the features that I'd need for it to become my daily driver is still missing, it's _so much faster_.
I've resorted to "Client for Jira" from the guys who did DeskZilla. Neither is "supported" or developed anymore, but still working fine for my day-to-day (searches especially). If there's an unsupported API I haven't found it yet.
p.s. It's fascinating how long products like Jira end up existing through sheer market penetration. I don't know a single developer who doesn't passionately hate Jira, and yet it is somehow the "standard."
It might be an alternative to Jira Cloud, which is cool and all, but your comment is just completely misleading.
Top comment:
> Here's this great alternative from a buddy of mine that can't do on-prem in the first place
I'm confused. Do people like this product better for other reasons, or is the issue that this isn't disclosed in the comment?
Trello / Kanban / Agile style 'project management', gnatt / burndown charts and velocity etc. are nice for day to day views for people working at the coal-face and the never-ending war of attrition.
But a lot of the competing tools are not as elegant when it comes to modeling interlinked cross-team processes end-to-end.
(Full disc: I'm insider)
Well, as long as the perf aren't too bad (which seems to depends on the number of concurrent users), I don't mind Jira and neither the rest of my team, it's a tool that more or less does its job in bug and task tracking. Though we were to customize our workflow/fields to do what we want.
I could go on...
that screen should be customisable
Now i'm filled with rage whenever i use jira cloud. It's unbearably slow. Besides that, it often happens that the text area that I just clicked lost focus somehow, i start typing, AND JIRA STARTS DOING STUFF. I don't know all the shortcuts so i don't even know what I just did.
WTF Jira?
Ultimately we went back to JIRA because clubhouse thought differently about agile workflow than we do. At the time, clubhouse didn't support sprints other than by adding labels - but the reports didn't reflect the sprint temporal boundaries. We found it really hard to create things like a view on sprint velocity. We also didn't agree with their view on what a team is but I forget the specifics.
It wasn't that JIRA is perfect, but it was either less wrong or more right depending on your perspective.
I am a fan of the newer Portfolio/Plan functionality in JIRA which I think replicates some of the features I liked about clubhouse, in forcing a large to small PBR, but I don't use the date planning features.
I can't see us considering a migration to another tool for at least a few years.
Edit - doing to considering
I did attempt to inspect some traffic on jira and confluence, and I suspect this is a symptom of micro frontends gone too far.
I still don’t think they will get through with this. There are too many regulated companies in Germany which self host JIRA for a reason.
I guess this JIRA cloud only is just another way to charge more for self hosted JIRA solutions
Whoever thought hotkeys without modifier keys we’re a good thing needs to be taken back to UI/UX school and retaught the basics of predictable interfaces.
I just wish it wasn't the defacto standard and CTOs started to get fired for choosing it.
That's how much I like it.
Be consistently used by everyone in a similar way using the same basic approach.
Have a lightweight workflow setup.
Be usefully integrated with confluence.
Not be used as a tool to punish Devs.
Last place used it to do the opposite of above, new place doesn't, same tool totally different outcome.
I don't mind it but it's very flexibility leads people to keep changing the workflow to fix the problem rather than addressing the problem.
Which is as always, unclear priorities, unclear requirements.
Tell me about it. Recently had a PM ask me for a time estimate for a task called "Create reporting tool for [network] interface data from [network monitoring tool]". No requirements. No further description whatsoever. And I told the PM three business days prior that I needed more information!
You would get tickets like "Support protocol X" or "Integrate with 3rd party Y" with absolutely no effort spent to answer the hard questions, and most of the time they don't even know X or Y beyond the marketing.
The best PM I worked with did comp-sci, decided he hated programming and went into project management, he got it.
The worst was promoted out of customer support and didn't have a fucking clue.
Those same types also believe that if only they can add enough custom fields and statuses and mandatory workflows the project will become self-managing and they can go and do whatever it is they think they do.
Basically, it sucks.
Ew.
It’s much worse than Jira.
Cloud offerings that hook into your existing IAM are really good these days. In fact, even the IAM can be off-prem (Okta). It relieves the maintenance and upgrade burden significantly.
Yet, open source + self-hostable services have found a niche. Many organizations can't use off-prem for anything remotely sensitive, so they turn to software like GitLab and Mattermost. Interestingly, I have noticed that these self-hosted services broaden their scope to incorporate functionality that might be covered by another service, to reduce said on-prem maintenance burden.
The key thing to remember is that Atlassian is an Australian company, they are bound to Australian laws, their cloud is not in the legal area of the European Union. For anyone who has sensitive information to store, all Atlassian projects just have died, because the vendor cannot be trusted to not abuse their position any more.
Hopefully alternatives will be rising, it's badly needed (especially given the ... shoddy state of the code/architecture behind Atlassian projects).
... This is going to mean changes in current $DAYJOB, as we are essentially locked to hosting everything in Germany.
Hosting in Australia for business unit that isn't there is right out. We will have more contact with AWS China than them at this point, because we are apparently going to have an unit there...
I once wrote a script to regularly hit all of my JIRA urls regularly so the aggressive caching features for a paid cloud service didn't punish me.
Jira Data Center doesn't get any new features anymore besides administrative back-end things, and is also very expensive.
Things look bleak in the Atlassian ecosystem.
Maintaining the on-prem use case for huge web+db apps is becoming too expensive as fewer and fewer customers use it.
Somehow I doubt that customer preference is the reason.
Atlassian just wants to be the next Oracle; their self-hosted version now starts at $40000 per year.
Whether they drive people off on-prem by raising costs or people leave because costs are raised isn’t really an interesting distinction, it’s the two sides of the same coin.
Jira is, among other things, a document storage solution. Security aside, at the minimum most people would like to be able to back up and access their critical files.
Jira to me is just an issue manager though. I know there are plugins these days for document management inside Jira itself but I haven’t tried them. Don’t people normally have separate document solutions like Confluence or SharePoint for docs (aside from document that are attached to issues of course)?
People who buy into Jira heavily use it primarily as a communications platform, to structure and make searchable the stuff that would otherwise be lost in the swamp of email and Slack and face-to-face messages.
> aside from document that are attached to issues of course
Aye, there's the rub. The documents in Confluence are often less important than the documents in Jira. You commit the paper trail to Jira - the primary info you get from your customers and bosses. Confluence is just the docs from the legacy crap you forgot to update last year.
How integrates Jira Cloud with Fisheye ? I don't see a cloud option for FishEye, so it keeps being on a local server...
https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing?tab=self-man...
I have to assume that Atlassian have some internal number regarding how many customers they expect to lose.
Time to find a replacement for that one, too. Ugh.
Also, they're going to lose secure government contracts with this, because Data Center is way above the size of a project team.
Not sure if those integrations would translate well to the cloud version.
There's also something about owning your own data...
Besides, I found Jira ok enough speed-wise, but judging from all the comments on HN each time Jira is mentioned, the cloud version seems not fun at all.
Not every product domain can operate where they only rent access to the authoritative copy of their records. Or don't have control to acceptance test / rollback the specific versions of the software involved in displaying/modifying those records.
In the past I've worked on safety critical software. As a first order approximation: either the local IT department's disaster recovery plan can ensure continuity of all the quality systems' digital records, artifacts and tools, or you don't actually have a quality system.
Similarly Oracle will continue to sale on-prem DB.
Real products can make real money. If an ISP goes down, company could internally function with on-prem.
Don’t take that away for Jira. I love Confluence, but it or Sharepoint could be replaced by a file server if needed.
Jira’s not like that. There are too many things it does where it relies on being an extendable and searchable database with a custom workflow. There’s not a hack for that, it’s an essential product.
If you can’t afford to manage it being used that way then hire someone to do it.