The dust is slowly settling on the big changes that Atlassian has announced about its licensing. It plans to phase out the Server platform and focus on the Cloud (for small and medium sized companies) and Data Center (designed for enterprise). We described these changes in more detail in our previous blog post, and in retrospect we can see that this decision makes sense – it means not fighting on three fronts at once. In this blog, we’ll say that the changes in question have merit.
When the announcement of the end of Server support was first made, there was a wave of both recognition and criticism. The themes that resonated in this context were differences in functionality, price and integration options. Let’s take a look at these, as many clues suggest that this indication of direction to the Cloud was more thoughtful than it might have seemed at first glance. Let’s go through some of the headings of questions about the platform and show the arguments for and against.
Changes to functionality
Perhaps the biggest question mark for users was the potential change in functionality of their Jira and Confluence instances: not all addons in use at this point are compatible with the Cloud, some laborious changes to the Jira and Confluence environments were created by modifications to files on the server, interventions to the database, and more complex automations were provided by embedded pieces of code (Groovy, Javascript, and others) or compiled into addons. We don’t really find such easy access to the “guts” of an application on the Cloud, but there are reasons that compensate well.
Atlassian has made it clear that migrating addons to the Cloud is a priority for it, and it is putting adequate pressure on publishers to make the rollout as broad and as seamless as possible. In consultations with clients, it turns out that a number of extensions that cannot be migrated are historical process implementations. These can be addressed more elegantly and easily today, with the help of addons or automation. Migrating to the Cloud therefore becomes a great opportunity to consolidate processes, products, infrastructure and the implementation itself. Extensions that nevertheless prove to be necessary are implementable via REST APIs, for example.
It is therefore advisable to look at the migration of your deployed Atlassian products also from the perspective of process revitalization.
Price of licenses
These considerations were closely followed by a recalculation of licence prices for many users. The first estimates showed that the price for the Cloud would be higher than the price for the Server. Atlassian has again shown that this is not so clear-cut. It offers two Cloud licensing alternatives – monthly and yearly.
With the monthly payment, the total price is calculated per active user, which is great news for clients who are just above the user tier for Server. If you needed to engage user number 101 in Jira Server, you had to purchase a license for 250 users. With Cloud, this doesn’t happen and you only ever pay for as many users as there are active at any given time.
The annual payment for Atlassian Cloud, on the other hand, works at the aforementioned and familiar user levels, but with two differences:
The price per year is calculated as the price for 10 months, so you save the amount for 2 months
The user license levels are more user friendly and are tiered in 100 user increments for 100 to 1000 users. For 1000 to 2000, the individual tiers are 200 users.
In some cases, this will make Cloud licenses cost you even less than server licenses.
A significant incentive and benefit of the Cloud platform is the various discounts for clients who are trying out Cloud products or migrating to them. These are so-called Loyalty discounts for new purchases of annual licenses (up to 55%), migration trial licenses (up to 12 months in length, depending on your maintenance validity) and dual licensing (up to 12 months of maintenance validity when purchasing a Cloud license). If you are interested, we will be happy to provide you with a no-obligation Cloud license price quote and information about your discounts.
Integration and directing
When considering and comparing the costs of Cloud and Server, it’s important to realize that the Cloud platform removes a lot of the human work that administrators have to spend on maintaining the environment, regular updates and troubleshooting, not to mention the risk of data loss that potential incidents in your own environment bring with them. Atlassian’s cloud products are a comfort: you don’t have to worry about anything, and the responsibility (e.g. for uptime) is on the provider’s side. Atlassian wants to make the transition to the Cloud easier and therefore creates tools to help with the migration and provides a wide range of support to clients.
The advantage of migrating to the Atlassian Cloud is, among other things, that you can migrate gradually and integrate your products with each other. There is nothing stopping you from starting by implementing the Confluence knowledge base in the Cloud and interlinking it with your current Jira Service Management customer portal. Not enough interlinking, but need deeper integration? That’s not a problem either, as several add-ons from the Atlassian Marketplace enable full task synchronization between Cloud and Server versions of Atlassian products. Yet even linking Service Management portals to mail is handled faster and easier by Atlassian in the Cloud than on the Server platform.
Let us help you!
If you’re considering migrating to Atlassian Cloud, we hope this blog has cleared up some questions for you. How to make a successful and convenient migration? You can start by asking yourself basic analytical questions:
Which all products do you want to move to the Cloud? Which addons? What is the instance size?
How do your users typically perform in Atlassian products? What all roles do they hold? Where do you manage your users?
What customizations (e.g. scripts, automations, integrations) do you use to achieve functionality?
Do you have any corporate or team security regulations and restrictions?
Answering these questions is the beginning of a Cloud migration. They help you determine your needs, estimate the complexity, and plan your course of action. After assessment and analysis, preparation, migration and control follow – but that’s a topic for another blog post. If you have further questions about migration, we are ready to help you professionally with all these steps – just contact us.
Extra tips:
Pavol Sočuvka,
Atlassian consultant
Our Atlassian solutions
