It's funny that they recently killed self-hosted Jira. If you'd self-hosted you'd be fine.
I don't want any of my company trapped on it, but if they were I'm sure as well not going to self host that spawn of hell.
Mostly downtime is just upgrades. I can remember a few times we've had to add (JVM) memory as our usage increased. Not sure what we're going to do with the discontinuation of server product line. We self-host to keep source code, etc. more than one configuration mistake (or zero-day) away from exposing it to the world.
But then, there is no way to keep it in sync. I have to blow that project away in jira cloud, and migrate it again.
So I Have to hard-cut over projects, on a system that has dozens and dozens of projects, and somehow have people figure out which ones are where. or one really, really ugly night to cut it all over, and hope it goes well.
I'm looking for alternatives, but our team is so invested in some very, very customized workflows, its going to be a pain.
I think one reason Atlassian was successful is that they always invested a lot of effort in building tools to migrate to their products from any of their competitors (obviously not the other way around).
Maybe. But you're counting on your sysadmin(s), who are also managing dozens of other things, to keep up to speed on Jira and its quirks, and apply patches and new versions as they become available without missing any steps or screwing something up.
On average, you're still probably better off having a company that knows the product also host it for you, but obviously they can make mistakes too, and the downside is that when they do it might affect all clients, not just one.
This is also potentially an upside. For example when us-east-1 went down recently, customers were somewhat understanding because it was "amazon's fault" and everyone was down - it was in the news, etc. If we ran our own data center and that went down, our customers would've just said "why did you morons roll your own data center instead of just using aws?"
Some companies cannot operate effectively without atlassian products, so a fuckup of that scale might just have legal consequences depending on whom it hits.
Kind of their problem to be frank.
> so a fuckup of that scale might just have legal consequences depending on whom it hits.
Any contract those companies signed would have a cap on the retributions by Atlassian for trashing SLA targets
In the external services I use, downtime of one service or other is to be expected at least a few times a year, and the “sunsets” happen occasionally.
Thing is, public services are solving a much more difficult problem (keeping things running safely for millions).
All that to say, I don't think it's a weird phenomenon, it's just you're realizing that you're paying someone else for something that's not delivered on.
so selfhosting may still have certain upsides even with such outage
In this case, it seems like the company took a risk and it did not go well. The possibility of being able to restore from backups might have been factored into this risk, but the latency of doing so might not have been.
If you're self-hosted, you dedicate as many people as possible/necessary to restoring your service, and it becomes their top priority.
You also have a lot more insight into the detailed inner workings of the restore, making it easier to plan against, instead of just vague "we're working on it" messages for days a time with no clear end in sight.
I’ve never – not at any point in the past 10 years – gone over 24h of downtime.
JIRA will now have 3 weeks downtime.
Distributed systems have complexity that grows superlinear, which leads to more and longer incidents.