Atlassian users complain of cloud migration dead ends, especially in UK
- Reference: 1697610909
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/10/18/atlassian_server_imgration_deadend/
- Source link:
Atlassian will end support for its on-prem server in February 2024, and gave customers over three years notice of that decision. The company offers two alternatives: SaaS or “Datacenter” licenses. The latter, however, are charged for at least 500 users. Customers who acquired licenses for server products, which started at ten seats, therefore face big price rises.
A migration to the Atlassian cloud is not an option for some UK users.
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“We currently have no options with Atlassian,” one reader told The Register . “We're ISO27001 certified so can't go out of support and can't host our data outside the UK.”
[3]
[4]
“When we've asked when UK residency will be available in response to Atlassian sales emails trying to move us to cloud, they have ignored us.”
Atlassian’s [5]roadmap for providing UK data residency states the feature is “coming soon” in “Q4 2023 - Q1 2024”. The company confirmed that timeframe remains accurate. The Register pointed out that Q1 2024 stretches beyond February 15th, the day on which support for Atlassian servers expires. The company did not comment.
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The reader quoted above told The Register they’ve started a migration to GitLab.
Another UK-based reader, who works for a global system integrator and contacted us on condition of anonymity, revealed that the company he works for has a substantial Atlassian product instance for its own use that will migrate to a Datacenter license. But it also maintains numerous small Atlassian server licences for reasons of privacy. Atlassian hasn’t offered a solution.
“We’ll just have to move away from them to something we hope is more sensible and stays that way,” the reader told The Register .
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Other readers pointed out that they’ve integrated third party products with their Atlassian software, and those links are not reproducible in Atlassian’s cloud.
“The decision of whether or not to continue after February 2024 in an abusive relationship is a hard one,” one reader wrote.
This reader shared a story we’ve heard from other sources about Atlassian salespeople urging upgrades and not considering customer complaints.
“We have created spreadsheets for them showing the cost comparisons [of migration options]. We have had them list the benefits (nearly zero) and asked for the justification. The answer is always because SaaS is better.” This customer also said Atlassian tried to migrate them well before the end of support deadline, which they saw as a cash grab before it was needed.
Another response to our story came from an enterprise with 2,000 licences for server products that calculated license costs would triple after migration to either Atlassian’s cloud or datacenter licenses.
“It's really ridiculous the price increase for us and we can't continue with Atlassian products anymore, I guess it's same for many others too.”
A reminder: one of Atlassian’s [8]values is “Don’t #@!% the customer”.
[9]US cybercops urge admins to patch amid ongoing Confluence chaos
[10]Atlassian buys 'asynchronous video' outfit Loom for almost $1 billion
[11]WFH mandates bad for staff morale and stunt innovation
[12]Results are in for biggest 4-day work week trial ever: 92% sticking with it
Developer experience product debuts
For customers willing to stick around, or clamber aboard, Atlassian today released a new product called “Compass” that it bills as a “developer experience” tool.
As explained to The Register by Taylor Pechacek, head of product for Compass at Atlassian, the tool represents a single source of all the resources developers use.
“There is an explosion of components in software,” he said. “Developers have to keep track of many more elements.”
Citing Gartner research that claims one in five development orgs will dedicate ten percent of their coders to building a platform that improves the productivity of the rest, Pechacek argued that managing software components is painful and hurts developer productivity. Using Compass, he said, means that when developers chat about a service they’re working on “everyone knows about what it is and the resources to understand it better.”
Pechacek said Compass identifies relevant libraries and repositories used by a project and makes them available to developers so that if they’re working on related projects, they don’t have to hunt for the resources they’re expected to use. The result is a tool analogous to platform-as-a-service, but tuned to the need of each application or service an org employs.
Compass is SaaS and is available today. A free tier creates a catalogue of software components. The $7/month edition offers the full “developer experience” platform.
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/16/atlassian_cloud_migration_server_deprecation/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZS@sxw0-PoJYmzzs3yz6IwAAARc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZS@sxw0-PoJYmzzs3yz6IwAAARc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZS@sxw0-PoJYmzzs3yz6IwAAARc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-11098
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZS@sxw0-PoJYmzzs3yz6IwAAARc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZS@sxw0-PoJYmzzs3yz6IwAAARc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.atlassian.com/company/values
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/17/confluence_zero_day_advisory/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/13/atlassian_acquires_loom/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/12/wfh_mandates_bad_for_staff/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/21/4_day_work_week/
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Many companies can't go cloud
There are very many companies (my personal experience is defence contractors) where the whole development team does not have Internet access. It has to work with on-Prem air-gapped resources. A number of these are soon to become ex-Atlassian customers.
Re: Only yesterday I wrote:
If the company's got a hard requirement for UK hosting then it should have ensured its hosting contract included guarantees and liquidated damages to cover the costs of moving if their host renaged. Atlassian would, I'm sure, have said "it's our standard contract - take it or leave it", at which point the company could have walked away.
Or - IT were ignored when they warned the directors that this could be a problem and running their own servers could be cheaper in the long run than moving to a new provider every few years.
Re: Only yesterday I wrote:
Also I would question the value of ISO27001 if it can be negated in moment by a 3rd parties actions.
And by 1st party actions. Some corps are going all into cloud, but the CxO's won't be there when the shit hits the fan.
Re: Only yesterday I wrote:
negated in moment
TBF, customers have had three years. But it's a fair point - ticking the box at a single point in time is a lot easier than managing the risk of it becoming unticked in the future, though the expectation is that doing the former implies you have a plan for the latter.
Relief
Imagine being a software developer earning typical UK engineering wage and then your employer comes up with:
Compass identifies relevant libraries and repositories used by a project and makes them available to developers so that if they’re working on related projects, they don’t have to hunt for the resources they’re expected to use.
Now you only need to hunt for reduced price food...
"The reader quoted above told The Register they’ve started a migration to GitLab."
Yup. Same here. Similar requirements (data souvereignty et c.).
We are lucky, we had some dev teams host their own GitLab solutions (they were sort of a separate entity), so there are people with some experience (like being able to say: yeah, don't do that stuff, sounds great but you'll regret it).
“developer experience”
Any time I see "experience" in marketing blurb I mentally add "bad" in front of it.
Alternatives
There are many open-source alternatives for Jira, which is Atlassian's main product. Just go with that and leave Altassian behind.
Only yesterday I wrote:
I'd no more place my systems in the hands of a cloud operator than I'd place my john thomas in the hands of a lunatic with a pair of scissors.
Seems some people did just that.
Also I would question the value of ISO27001 if it can be negated in moment by a 3rd parties actions.