Overview of operating options for Atlassian tools

linkyard supports several operating options for Atlassian tools. In this article, we present the various options.

Atlassian fundamentally distinguishes between the following deployment variants:

• servers
• data centre
• Cloud

The variant servers is for on-premise operation or with an IT service provider intended, although the system can only be operated on a single server at the same time. In the event of a system failure, an interruption is mandatory until a failover can take place. From a performance perspective, the system cannot be scaled to more users at will and slows down as the system load increases.

The variant Data Center is also for on-premise operation or with an IT service provider In this case, the system can be operated on a cluster with several nodes. The system can thus be operated in a highly available and highly scalable manner.

The variant Cloud is reserved for use by Atlassian.

Not all products are available in every variant. The following graphic shows the availability of the products per deployment variant.

app marketplace

An important concept is that most Atlassian applications can be extended with so-called apps. This gives other software manufacturers the opportunity to expand Atlassian's products. For this purpose, Atlassian operates the Atlassian Marketplace. The plugins are also provided depending on the deployment variant (server, data center, cloud), although not all variants are always supported. In addition, apps for the Atlassian Cloud often differ significantly from apps for servers and data centers, as they are implemented differently from a technical point of view. We also explain more about this in the article “Data protection in the Atlassian cloud”.

In our experience, it is rather rare for a customer to use Jira or Confluence without any other apps. Depending on their particular use case, most customers use certain additional apps from third-party manufacturers.

Licenses and subscriptions

As far as licensing is concerned, this variant is servers about a licensing model. When purchasing a license, there are one-time licensing costs; from the second year, maintenance fees of over 50% of the license price are charged. If maintenance is not extended, you will no longer have access to new software versions or security patches that were released after the end of the maintenance period. However, the system usually continues to run after the maintenance has ended. However, this isn't always true for third-party apps. Depending on the manufacturer's policy, these apps sometimes also discontinue their service.

With Data Center and Cloud subscriptions are purchased by the customer. After the subscription expires, the software no longer works and the subscription must be extended accordingly in good time. In contrast to the variant servers Subscriptions only have consistent recurring costs. There are therefore no one-off additional costs for initial licensing.

linkyard supports all operating models

We support our customers regardless of the chosen operating model and provide a full service for the products, from consulting and customizing to training, software development and support. In the case of servers and data centers, we also offer operation as a managed service. What is special about our managed service is that the customer can decide whether the service is operated on linkyard infrastructure, on public cloud infrastructure or on specific private cloud infrastructure at the customer's site or at the customer's data center provider.

Which variant is the right one?

Various aspects must be considered when choosing the operating model. This includes considerations regarding interfaces to be implemented, security & compliance considerations as well as the exact intended use and number of users. On the occasion of The EU-U.S. Privacy Shields are coming to an end, do we have the aspect of data protection on the Atlassian Cloud and in the Linkyard operating models separately specially illuminated.

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linkyard is a Gold Atlassian Solution Partner based in Switzerland and offers full service for its products. In addition to product knowledge, linkyard also offers proven know-how in the areas of management, project management (Lean/Agile and classic), security, compliance, risk management, requirements engineering or software architecture. linkyard specializes in technically sophisticated integrations and customers with particularly high standards of information security and data protection. The linkyard information security management system is certified according to ISO/IEC 27001:2013.