Using Atlassian cloud products is a business risk. They previously let customers sit for weeks without access to their data [1]. Cloud-hosted products do get early patches for unsecured /setup routes though [2], so there's that.
At this point the decision has been made in our org to firewall their products off the internet and internal networks, and migrate to something else by 2024.
We're in the same boat. I brought Confluence into our org almost a decade ago — it was the best collaborative wiki tool at the time. Over time the price has increased while the quality of the tool has not kept pace with other options. This seems to be the trend as software companies grow into large "enterprise" providers.
Looking at our Confluence usage over the years, I noticed that we use it primarily as a knowledgebase/documentation tool and less for collaboration. With our on-prem license expiring, we are migrating to a dedicated knowledgebase for our FAQ and frequently changing content and switching to a Markdown tool + Git for our more formal documentation.
>I brought Confluence into our org almost a decade ago — it was the best collaborative wiki tool at the time
I respectfully disagree with that assertion! I remember 2012 (okay, 11 years ago). I had just joined a new team at work, and the documentation for the team was a lot of vendor PDFs and some .txt files from the lead stored on a network drive.
The company was just implementing Confluence, but it was slow on client and server side with no HA. That is the fault of the server team, not Atlassian, but still the software was ick.
I spun up a shadow-IT Dokuwiki server that was much easier to use for a small team with text-based documentation needs. It had a naive "calendar" plugin that allowed the quick creation of pages based on date, which we used for oncall hand-off. Backup was zipping the data folder on the server.
It was probably 3 more years until our hand was forced to use the "enterprise standard" for business continuity purposes.
Sure. We're focusing first on converting everything to plain Markdown and using a Git repo to manage the content. Writers can use whatever Markdown tool they prefer for this. (I'm using Obsidian and others are iA Writer.) I have yet to decide on the docs publishing tool, but I'm testing Astro, Vitepress, and Markdoc for publishing. I'm leaning towards Astro since it's very flexible, easy to add small bits of interactivity via MDX, and has a nice collection of themes. VitePress is also very nice, super fast, and very easy to publish. Since only the developers and tech writers need to collaborate on the docs, we're following a docs-as-code approach — using GitHub issues, comments, and pull requests.
Here's some info about Astro for folks like me who didn't know about it before:
"Markdown is commonly used to author text-heavy content like blog posts and documentation. Astro includes built-in support for standard Markdown files that can also include frontmatter YAML to define custom metadata such as a title, description, and tags."
You should take a look at foam. It's a toolchain for notes and such, similar to obsidian, but open source. It's main interface is a vscode plugin, but has HTML generators and such, as well as just being markdown, so you can use Pandoc or anything else to make HTML out of it
I wish people would link software they recommend, because it saves me a lot of confusion when they are semi obscure. I believe this is the software you are referring to? (I'm using obsidian but don't like that it's not opensource and don't like logseq, except for their journals feature so I'm actually quite interested in checking out foam)
https://foambubble.github.io/foam/
Not speaking for the GP. I use MkDocs and keep my personal notes. The only weak spot for me is that I haven't fully grokked search and as my notes grow, it can be harder to find things. I alternate between figuring out how search and how to bolt on some other search utility.
MkDocs includes a utility to publish to Github pages but I keep my notes on a self hosted Gitea server and serve using "python -m http".
Author of Material for MkDocs here. We're currently working on re-architecting the entire search engine and rewriting it from scratch. We're currently based on lunr.js, which is unmaintained as of 2020 and has more or less run its course. We've learned a lot what matters in respect to efficient and user friendly documentation search, and can't wait to give the first version into the hands of our users. I'm convinced that the next iteration of search we'll be releasing will solve many of the shortcomings that our current implementation has. Of course, it will work on the client side as it does now, no server needed, but there will be other options as well, e.g. for when your search index is in the megabytes and too big to ship to clients.
The search works great. I'm using MkDocs with Material as my personal handbook because of the simplicity -- for example, I usually remember great articles in conversations but always forget their location. Since I started writing my newsletter https://opsindev.news/ including an MkDocs web archive, I can share interesting URLs way faster :) Or let folks discover it by themselves, using the search.
Material for MkDocs also has an insiders build, accessible through sponsorship. https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/insiders/ These features add more value to MkDocs -- I initially joined to get GDPR-compliant cookie banners and stayed to support a great project.
If I understand your question, it's a lot simpler than that. (Simpler as in not that functional.) It represents the directory structure as cascading menus.
I edit using VS Code and it provides help with linking from one document to another, including navigating to the file and even linking second level ('##') headings. MkDocs can report broken links when it builds the site.
Collaboration could be through sharing a Git repo. Perhaps other other ways I can't think of at this moment. Any way you could collaborate editing text files should work.
OTOH couldn't it be done with Cloudflare Zero Trust ?
Have the GH Pages (sub)domain proxied with CF, protect the URL with Zero Trust, for SSO itself there are several IdP available [0]. First 50 users are not billed.
I haven’t tried doing this, although I’ve thought of it to solve a similar problem, which I ultimately solved by not bothering and just letting GitHub render the docs. (Purely internal technical use cases, so not an issue.)
I haven’t experimented, but my first attack would be to query the GH Pages service directly and specify the host header. Bypass Cloudflare entirely.
GitHub Pages supports SSO with the enterprise cloud plan, of course.
I assume that means that every person accessing the pages also needs a github account? I don't mind a requirement for a github account for anyone contributing to the repo but I would like authenticated access for viewing the pages that doesn't require a Github account.
Obsidian has a feature called "Shared vaults" which teams use to collaborate. You can also use a shared Git repo, or other cloud/network storage (e.g. Dropbox)
I used it with a team of 10 folks at my previous job. Everyone worked in a common git repo, and with some smart usage of .gitignore, we were all able to collaborate quite effortlessly, even going so far as to push videos, images, etc to the repo with git-lfs to make the documentation rich and available. It can certainly be multiplayer with a modicum of effort.
As a former Atlassian administrator, I believe the opposite. Maintaining the system on-premise was a bigger risk.
The products are too complicated to be packaged nearly with a bow for sysadmins. You inevitably start having to become at Atlassian SME just to keep that shit running.
I’m all for your company going with an alternative product, but for a company who would rather stick with Atlassian products, you’d be insane to prefer the on-premise version.
Either insane or you’re a giant company with heavy compliance requirements and you don’t mind hiring a dedicated person/team to operate the data center product and babysit other on-premise vendors’ services.
In my experience, I was running an on-premise Jira installation for a <100-person company, which was an insane waste of my time compared to the other tasks I could have been doing to help build our core product.
Completely opposite here. We ran jira for many years on-prem, it was mostly effortless - maybe a few man/days per year? (user accounts in low 3 digits, but we kept workflows simple and ran light on plugins).
I'm curious what were actually tasks that wasted your time?
Classic JIRA is very flexible into shaping a workflow, but it's sort of a very long pipeline of: schemas, fields, workflows, project templates, etc. I loved that flexibility and being able to drill down into a bug report, but it definitely took time to set up, and occasionally unravel & put back together when you needed to fix something small.
There's also the usual stuff of finding & setting up plugins, and then looking for a maintenance window that people can agree on, while side-stepping those settings you forgot needed a restart to apply (thus bringing your live maintenance to a halt because you can't bring it offline now).
Running core versions of the products aren't terrible - usually the complexity comes with the slough of plugins that folks install to customize the platform, all needing to stay up-to-date.
One of the challenges of Gitlab is that the pricing does not work well in organizations where a significant portion of accounts would need to be non-developer roles.
With devs and a premium tier, this isn't bad... but the "ok, we need to double the user count and move from premium to ultimate, even though most people are only looking for multi-level epics and the reporter role." That represents a significant cost increase.
Taking all the devs from $29 to $99 and doubling the accounts is a lot more than $15 per account (devs, ba/pm/mgr, business).
MSFT also does volume discounts and if you have enough spend they'll give you GitHub for free when renewing VS licenses. I'll take GH anyday over Atlassian when it comes to collaboration.
The problem with this though, is that commonly a requirement (ticket) does not map exactly to a single code repository.
I feel that it is breaking encapsulation in a sense to be dealing with issues at the repo level. The repo and the code are implementation details of the business requirements. The tickets describing requirements belong at the next level up of abstraction?
Hi there! I lead the product teams for planning features at GitLab. Issues at the group level are in the works to meet this exact need. You can follow the work in this issue https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/8308 . As always, would love to hear from you in the issue if you have feedback about the approach or have follow up questions.
I do use gitlab-ce at home for my personal projects and think it's awesome.
I would recommend it to work in terms of its features for code management and build pipelines.
But I just cannot see any of our product management team wanting to use this for Roadmap/Epic/Task tracking at all. Its far too technical and too close to the code, both of which are things they have neither the time, interest or skill to interact with. Management are comfortable with Jira (and some of the extended Atlassian suite), as it hides the technical stuff away and allows them to focus on the management data.
I don't know what the perfect solution looks like though, and I also haven't spend the time to exhaustively try all the competing products either.
>[Roadmap/Epic/Task tracking] Its far too technical and too close to the code
I'm a Product Manager in the Plan stage at GitLab and I'd love to learn more about this impression. Would you be willing to share more either in thread or on a call?
Specially, I'm trying to understand what about the GitLab Plan tools (epics, roadmaps, etc) feel dev-centric?
One way to approach this would be using Epics [0], which can live at the group-level. Child epics and/or issues can then be used for more finely tuned requirements.
I should point out that multi-level epics are only available at Gitlab's $99 per user per month level. We wanted to use them, but it's not worth that much. Jira is a lot more flexible and cost effective in this regard.
There is no perfect issue tracking system sadly and integration with prs and commits actually is becoming a hard requirement for me. This is not something that people should be updating to an issue tracker manually, ever. Or doing without entirely (more common). Also nice in Github is the integration with Github actions and being able to see whether something can be merged safely or not.
I double as a product manager and CTO, meaning I do both code and planning. We're using Github issues and Asana. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. I'd take both over Jira any day. And since I'm in charge, my company is blissfully free of anything Atlassian.
I kind of like Asana for planning. It's got a few sane features one of which is separating issues from projects. This allows me to quickly plan out projects and then add tickets to the relevant team boards. And another one is making it very easy to create issues in a spreadsheet like view that minimizes the click bureaucracy other tools have. Great when you basically are thinking at the bullet point level and just want to hit enter instead of having to fiddle with obnoxious modal forms.
Of course for developers Asana isn't great because it has no markdown support and no usable github integration (a few commercial things exist but they are basically glorified sync tools). Github issues have a few nice features as well. I like working with check lists and then converting the individual items to tasks. That comes close to how I like to use Asana.
Where Github falls off a cliff is what passes for project management. I don't know what their PMs were smoking but it's just completely wrong and useless. It kind of lives orthogonal to issues (!!!!!) and nothing syncs automatically except with really awkward github actions crap. So, it only serves to add a lot of bureaucracy and busy work without actually addressing the core problem. A combination of over engineered and inadequate.
The core issue with Github is that issues are tied to a single code repository. From a planning point of view that is just horrible because I manage a product consisting of multiple code repositories and I need one plan that may involve zero or more code repositories and not several and I don't want to lock in my issues to a single repository before I have even figured out what the plan is. I guess that's what they tried to fix with their project management thingy. Except they messed that up badly.
I'd love a tool that is a bit like Asana but more integrated with pull requests, CI/CD, the notion of work being distributed across multiple code repositories, teams, etc. I don't mean yet another sync thingy that copies tickets from system X to system Y. I would like a one stop shop that can be used throughout the life cycle of a software product from before any code is written until users / customers start reporting issues and everything in between. Doesn't exist.
We've moved to plain markdown in Git(Lab) as Confluence replacement. A CI pipeline compiles it to HTML and hosts it on the web via Material for MkDocs.
It lacks most collaboration options for non-developer users, but we found that they are rarely, if at all, used anyway. Non-developer users can still use an edit button that points to GitLab's web editor and update the docs that way.
I can't suggest a replacement for Jira at this point. I don't think there is one tool to recommend that fits every company's workflow. The other comments seem to have some nice tools to try.
> It lacks most collaboration options for non-developer users, but we found that they are rarely, if at all, used anyway. Non-developer users can still use an edit button that points to GitLab's web editor and update the docs that way.
The wiki uses the same Rich Text editor as known from issue/MR comments, aiding visual editing with context actions - for example, Markdown tables, rows, columns, or uploading and resizing images.
> Material for MkDocs.
I personally love this project. I'm using it for o11y.love and opsindev.news published via GitLab pages. Editing happens mainly in the browser, using the Web IDE.
Gitlab and github are a lot more than simple markdown. They support a lot of additions like equations, and mermaid graphs. The only thing I've used confluence for that won't work in out of the box gitlab is a circuit diagram. And the right way to do that was probably to have the pipeline generate an svg from the circuit simulation model, not draw it.
Despite the "Azure" name, Azure DevOps Server (formerly Team Foundation Server), is still a rock-solid on-prem system for git repo hosting, issues/stories/projects, build automation, and the rest - though I feel it has stagnated somewhat, and git integration still feels half-baked compared to TFS's previous SVN-clone, but is still my first-choice for on-prem installs (granted, I'm still wedded to the MSFT stack).
> Who the f wants to waste their day with that UX and feature set?
TFS' UX is hardly any worse than Jira's.
BTW, if your complaint is based on your personal experience dealing with hideously complex Issue/Bug form-fields, "areas", and the like, then that's not so-much an issue with TFS/AzureDevOps, but with your PMs, who are the ones responsible for applying customizations to the built-in workflow forms. The stock workflow forms/fields are a (relative) breeze to use compared to Jira, IMO (but GitHub Issues+Projects are better, I agree).
Having been forced to daily drive both for the past few years, I'd take DevOps over Jira any day. Neither is great, but DevOps has had 100% fewer incidents of adding a comment to the wrong issue because of a dog slow UI that's chock full of race conditions.
If you have access to Azure DevOps Server your company likely also has access in its existing plans to GitHub Enterprise (on-prem) as well. GitHub Enterprise is usually about 6 to 9 months behind GitHub "Regular", but that's quite a bit better than Azure DevOps "Regular" which now seems destined to be 2-3 years behind GitHub and however far Azure DevOps Server trails behind that.
Microsoft is still playing "will they/won't they" with killing Azure DevOps for whatever reasons make sense mostly only to themselves, but it is hard not to wonder if the writing is on the wall to migrate to something like GitHub Enterprise sooner rather than later.
(Arguably yes, running GHE is different than Azure DevOps Server, as it is still mostly not Microsoft-stack. But I'm told they package it in a friendly enough way that even companies deep in Microsoft-stack-only don't have too many problems.)
I keep hearing rumors that I can’t corroborate that the decision has already been made to kill Azure DevOps but that there won’t be an announcement until there’s a timeline. I’ve never seen it in black and white. I’ve seen that comment several times on HN, but it’s always so couched that it’s sort of useless.
It seems like one of those rumors that doesn’t die, and then just becomes self-fulfilling if they ever do announce it.
Microsoft's "on the record" voice is always "Azure DevOps is alive and has an active roadmap".
You can read that roadmap for yourself. It is kept in a GitHub repository. Last time I checked this year the last commit was sometime in 2020. The last group of features that loudly launched for Azure DevOps were branded "GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps". (This is where I get the 2-3 years behind GitHub metric.) Microsoft's actions seem to be speaking a lot louder than their "on the record" words.
I've heard from multiple "off the record" sources who are entirely hearsay and I cannot name names that "Yes, of course Azure DevOps is dead."
The best, I can say, as mostly an outsider is that Azure DevOps is at least "undead" and definitely in some sort of zombie state. I've got an unsubstantiated feeling, again as mostly an outsider, that Microsoft is somehow superstitious about Azure DevOps' home office (Microsoft office in North Carolina was founded out of Microsoft's source control dreams) and is afraid to kill it.
I used to work at Microsoft, though I left a few years before MS purchased GitHub. Post-2010s, Microsoft was still migrating many products away from Perforce/SourceDepot and into TFS, and then TFS+git around ~2015. Microsoft hacked TFS to be a git server so they could continue to use TFS for work-item/project-tracking (and no-one wanted to go back to Product Studio). That’s TFS’ strength, as far as Microsoft is concerned, because git hosting is a trivially fungible feature here - whereas GitHub’s Issues only works well for small teams and really doesn’t scale to projects on the scale of Windows or Office.
…but I’ve noticed that GitHub’s recently (since 2020?) has really being fleshing-out their Projects/Issues - it’s not quite as flexible as TFS/AzDO’s Work-Items but on-track to reach parity in a few more years, I reckon.
So that’s my pet-theory: eventually GitHub (and GitHub Enterprise) will reach “good-enough” parity with AzDO for Issues/Work-Items/Project management - and as soon as that happens I fully expect AzDO to die an unceremonious death (because MS doesn’t want to spook the many Enterprise(TM) customers who still bankroll it). We may-or-may-not see some improvement in AzDO-to-GitHub migration tooling, as that that comes down to what side of the bed the Director of the ALM team woke up on that morning.
Yeah, GitHub Projects/Issues have picked up a lot of "features" that only a (Microsoft) PM could love. Many of them don't even light up unless you are in a paid organization (or GitHub Enterprise) (not just a paid account, but a paid organization) so probably a lot of GitHub users probably don't even realize how much GitHub now has feature "parity" with Jira or AzDO. (Nor how quickly that has happened.)
I'm mostly aware of it from GitHub Universe and Microsoft BUILD demonstration videos. Both of which give me a lot of signals that Microsoft internally has moved a lot faster to GitHub than it did from predecessors to TFS/TFS+git. Some of the teams talking about it are huge ones (both in terms of size but also in terms of weight internal/external to the company).
From their own hype videos in the virtual sides of the two conferences, I certainly get the impression they reached "good enough" feature "parity" with AzDO Work Items internally a year or two ago, at least. That doesn't seem like the reason they keep saying AzDO is still alive.
I do realize that AzDO has some big enough Enterprise customers though that not spooking them can be a big reason for the weird messaging despite their overt actions and all the subtle hints that AzDO is dead. But also, my understanding is that many of those customers don't entirely care if a migration needs to happen so long as they are given a migration with a far enough out deadline. [1] I know some companies seem to be acting more spooked that there isn't a deadline yet for AzDO's shutdown. (It was a factor in my last employer migrating to Atlassian's terrible products for everything but repository hosting after years in AzDO [after years in Bitbucket and Atlassian's terrible products and hating them; vicious cycle].)
I obviously don't know what Microsoft is truly waiting for at this point to kill AzDO, which gets back to that feeling that it is something fundamentally weirder such as a superstition.
[1] Case in point: no one seems to be shouting too much about the crazy Azure AD to Entra shenanigans because it has dates and timelines! The timelines don't even make sense: among other things, Azure AD B2B and Azure AD B2C both get marketed as "deprecated" months before their Entra counterparts are expected to leave "Beta" or "Preview" statuses and even more months before automated migration tools are expected to be available. But it is all a planned migration and that makes all the difference.
It's nice, has most of Jira features that were important for my org. Philosophy is bit different in some parts (eg. backlog management), so there was some complaining, but overall it's ok.
Only one major complaint: For main license, you can buy and own license for selfhosted version. However for helpdesk addon it's subscription only, which sucks a lot. For Spaces they have only subscription-based pricing, even when self-hosted. I hope they don't go Atlassian way.
Can anyone speak about YouTrack/Space's warts? The marketing blurbs makes Space + YouTrack look like a decent replacement for Jira + Confluence + Bitbucket, but I don't recall ever hearing a developer talk about it.
YouTrack is pretty great. So is TeamCity and they integrate well. The JetBrains instance is open so you can just sign up for an account there and play with it. Also you can run them both on-prem and they're pretty easy to admin if you do.
Space I haven't used. It seems like an attempt to reinvent both products in a GitLab style product which is a pity because the JetBrains tools are very mature and I don't think they needed a new product.
A decade ago when we used JIRA team-wide and not org-wide, some teams internally preferred YouTrack so they used that (until the whole org moved to JIRA). What bothered me personally was that fields were basically "unschema'd" and everything suggested every value -- everything was effectively a label field -- including typos, which are more common in a company where English is second language.
But that was a decade ago, and it could've been a misconfiguration on that team's part. It was also back when JIRA was more of a structured database with real issue types and not stories atop stories for all eternity.
Other than running a highly complex web application that would no longer be receiving maintenance and security patches, of which due to its age and stack appears to be a frequent cause for concern, I'm sure not much.
On-prem will keep existing IFF you have the capacity to pay for 500+ licenses. If you're a small to medium organization that still doesn't trust Atlassian to run your business-critical services (and there are a number of reasons why one might not want to: [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] ) you're SOL.
It is pricey - I will not disagree with you. It is 1-500 is the license tier and that costs $42,000 per year for the Jira data center subscription, $27,000 for Confluence, BitBucket is $2,300 for 1-25, Crowd is $5800 for 1-500, and Bamboo is $11k for up to 25 users.
I would not connect any of these services directly to the Internet.
Yes, I know and that's why I'm asking. I suspect many companies I know are on the "Server edition" and I'm curious how much more expensive it will get for them.
We went from Server -> Cloud -> GTFO. Server also had tiered pricing starting at $10 for 3 users. It went up from there in much saner increments but I don’t recall them.
We exited the ecosystem at the last cloud price hike. Their product pricing people are delusional.
Thanks! I dug bit deeper and found old pricing tables. For Jira and the 500 to 1000 user tiers I'm interested in it was roughly about twice the money going from Server to Datacenter. Interestingly the Datacenter prices per user are similar to the cloud prices, so from Atlassian's perspective it is more a price adjustment with regard to the incongruous Server pricing. From the customer perspective it's still a bummer and I guest many will go straight to the GTFO tier.
Yet I still cannot import anything like in the old editor (e.g. markdown), adding images in lists was added two years after forcing switching to the new editor and you still cannot continue numbered lists in another item line and have to start over.
Extensions exist to do this but these things should be standard in any editor.
The new editor in Jira is drives me nuts. They replaced a perfectly good, functional markdown editor with the current POS, and it causes me problems nearly every single day.
Atlassian stuggles with editors like no other company I've seen.
I don't remember the last time I had a problem with an editor except for using any Atlassian product. Not sure what the fuck they do, but they really seem to have trouble with this aspect of their products. Which is ironic because their products are essentially CRUD products with a heavy emphasis on data entry.
Like, if anything out their products needs to work well, it's the editors.
I think it's related to how atlassian develops their products - they acquire then. Jira, confluence and Trello have three different editors because they're three different products developed by three different companies.
And yet, they are trying to move Trello to the terrible rich text editor like Confluence. So far you can still opt out and send a "wtf are you doing?" feedback about the new editor, but I'm not sure how long that will last.
> I don't remember the last time I had a problem with an editor except for using any Atlassian product.
I hate jira and don't like confluence but I've had more problems in sharepoint online editor with losing serious hours of work to synchronization bugs than confluence.
All the talk about the office being a magnet, not a mandate... needs to apply to products as well. Magnets, not mandates.
Atlassian hasn't added much in the way of new features to the cloud instances, and the cloud options often take a lot longer to return queries.
And frankly, the "migrations" were never great... upgrading form some customized version of Atlassian (or just highly configured) to the cloud generally moved / changed things. Meh, sort of inevitable, but also really tedious. And don't get me started on how miserable "half-migrations" were where some teams moved and some didn't, or Jira moved but Confluence didn't. Those months in limbo with multiple logins and issues getting created in the wrong places were torture. Atlassian didn't really help customers with all this -- I was told they wouldn't even help us clone the Jira server so we could run migration tests... we had to do it live. (Something about Atlassian not offering another license without us paying for the test server as if it were a real server.)
Moving off Atlassian seems like a good call!
I pushed my org (at the time) to move to GitHub... we ran a test program, and it was successful, but I left the company before it was completed. I was so much happier with GitHub.
Never quite realized these were the same company. Mostly because they were forced on us, we basically did the bare minimum on those platforms, and they never took off.
The title is highly misleading. It appears they'll continue to sell on-premises licenses that are not perpetual and have a higher base price in the form of their Data Center offering.
They're just removing perpetual licenses for small numbers of seats (low volume). It makes sense that they want to push small customers to their cloud product, supporting on-prem software is truly laborious and best saved for your largest possible customers. That being said Atlassian is huge so they're either leaving money on the table or they're following the market. My guess is the latter.
In my recent adventures over the last few years, companies much larger than your average startup are increasingly amenable to cloud hosted services. I suspect this is in part due to how SOC2 has become so prevalent and relatively easy to obtain.
> It appears they'll continue to sell on-premises licenses that are not perpetual and have a higher base price in the form of their Data Center offering.
It's worse than that: it's also a reduced feature set. For example, Bamboo Server lets you use local agents but Bamboo Data Center does not.
Last year I was second guessing myself if migration to Gitlab EE from Jira, Bitbucket and Jenkins would be worth it, as it was a massive shift for my org. Maybe purchasing a DC version of Atlassian products would be a better alternative, but after short look into invoices and licensing it was decided to go forward with Gitlab. Still not a big fan of how stiff Yaml pipelines feel in Gitlab CI and that tickets for what seems like a simple feature [1] hang around for years, but it is nice. Developers like it, and i am happy that they are happy.
At a couple startups, I've promoted a mantra of "everything goes into GitLab".
If some information is not in GitLab Git and CI, it should be in GitLab Issues or (ugly) GitLab Wiki.
Those 4 words avoid a lot of problems. Including avoiding a proliferation of silo'd and leaked and lost information in numerous different SaaSes, apps/programs, and storage services that people will tend to do by default.
Plus, the cost of gitlab is getting insane. It's very hard to justify the jump, no matter how worth it is. Jira "just works" for now, and honestly it wouldn't surprise me if gitlab raises their pricing even further.
(which I totally understand, they are not profitable yet and have to do a lot of work. It's just that it sucks having to be cautious about who gets access to your instance since you can't have multiple tiers of users, once you use ultimate features everyone has to pay for an ultimate seat)
Yes this is the weird part. I have a very hard time thinking of an organization that would need ultimate features for even 30% of its staff. It's usually super niche features, or features that don't necessarily make sense on an individual seat level but that you have to pay for for every user. It makes the value proposition very hard to see, because sure generating security reporting and auditing are nice but why would we want to have that for every user? The only way to actually manage cost would be to have separate instances for teams which is a nightmare for selfhosting. Especially with the weekly update schedule lol
To me, a flat instance tier pricing + per seat cost would make so much more sense.
It's interesting that way, I assumed removing the silver tier and not having a real "personal pro" priced tier was just because the long tail wasn't worth it for them if they had to make a support commitment. So to hear the pricing is uncompetitive at larger scales too makes me wonder who they're pricing for
(However, to be fair the free plan includes some stuff that is only on the team plan for github, like 5gb for gitlab free vs 2gb for github teams)
But there's no way to have an actual "developer" role that isn't using non-ultimate seat right?
I get why in some sense, because once you use ultimate you switch to using a EE install instead of the CE. But I think even having the choice between ultimate and normal paid tiers would be great, even if it means no free users on the instance.
> Still not a big fan of how stiff Yaml pipelines feel in Gitlab CI
Maybe the pipeline editor in "Build > Pipeline editor" can help with live linting, or more advanced features such as parent-child pipelines or merge trains.
It was just an example of a number of small things and issues, that we were not expecting to be an issue by the 15th major release, but in general it's ok. We implemented a workaround.
One day the pendulum will swing back in the other direction. Until then, those of us who disagree with putting absolutely everything into the cloud will just have to sit back and bide our time.
I doubt that day will ever come without a significant number of potential customers stubbornly opting to go it alone with DIY on-prem alternatives (or at least somewhat SaaS-less - e.g. turnkey-on-IaaS or similar) in the interim. Though I guess that "stubborness" might become more likely as more & more stagnation & inflexibility of cloud SaaS reveals itself to customers over the coming years.
My company's recently been pushed off JIRA on-prem to their cloud offering & the migration has already been an absolute travesty. Any gaps there might have been in the near-universal hatred of JIRA have been thoroughly wiped out by now.
Or, you know, a SaaS cloud company could go belly-up and lose a ton of customer data with absolutely no backup or other compensation plan. "Suing the corpse" only works if the corpse hasn't already been looted. If that happens five or six times, it might swing the public perception.
Russia is probably an outlier here, but the pendulum here is swinging back to on-prem, especially if the cloud provider is located in a different country. (Example: former McDonalds recently bought an on-prem solution from our company, although we have a cloud version, too). Today you're on good terms with a cloud provider, tomorrow the politics go 360° and all your data is lost. Probably not not as urgent in the first world, but with the current segmentation of the Internet happening (e.g. restrictions in EU), I wouldn't be so certain about it.
Can't imagine it's good business to scare the existing customers away.. ;-)
But yeah, I think this is more dipping a toe into the water. They seem to be focusing on entirely new products with a reasonable small scope. It's interesting to see it happen, though, and they're moderately influential.
Can’t say I agree. I believe the method of distributing software historically was limited due to no easy access to public computing. Now the software distributor can more easily provide the software to the customer.
If ”cloud” was available in the 90s, I doubt that self hosting would have been as popular. Not saying its a wrong choice, just a matter of convenience.
Not gonna happen unless a new server OS arrives that's significantly easier to use than Linux.
The core diff between on-prem and cloud isn't where the data is hosted. It's that in one case someone else handles UNIX BS and in the other case you do. Get a MacOS-equivalent level of usability for servers in a form that isn't rent it by the hour, and you could see such a migration, but what's the incentive for anyone to build or support that when people are willing to pay so much for cloud services?
Almost total absence of GUIs and proper documentation. A big part of why people pay for AWS and friends is not instant scalability or even the fancy features, but simply because clouds wrap a half-way decent GUI around high level server oriented tasks combined with an actual task focused user guide.
To compare, try comparing the docs and GUI help you get deploying a simple serverless app to Lambda+RDS vs configuring a Linux box with systemd, apache/nginx, SSL termination, postgres, borgbackup or whatever other stack you want to use. The difference is night and day. The systemd docs alone are classic Linux BS culture. UNIX sysadmin is complicated in very fundamental and deep ways for people who don't have a gray beard. I know how to do it but I don't enjoy it, and I had to recently teach a friend of mine how to do basic tasks. He's a pro software dev with years of experience incl at Google but sysadmin was never something he needed to do. Luckily now ChatGPT can help a lot with the missing usability.
They're trying to document a system that wasn't designed with usability or GUIs in mind and they have a perverse incentive to keep Linux hard to use because that drives support subscriptions.
We've been running Jira on prem for years, paying for server support renewals etc.
We'll likely be running on prem as long as is reasonable without support, and then moving to an alternative - maybe gitlab. Atlassian lost our business with this move.
This is kind of hilarious since a lot of places where I've used Atlassian products seem to have more or less hated them but still put up with them for the sole reason that they are on-prem, and the competition available for the entire "suite" or whatever is pretty sparse. I'd be curious to see what kind of market share is estimated to be "on-prem, won't switch" because it sure isn't zero.
I also appreciate the irony layers of the companies that chose Atlassian's cloud products because "worst case we can install on-prem" but also picked the cloud products because they tried to install on-prem at least once and it was horrifying and they didn't want the stress of maintaining it.
JIRA has been annoying the shit out of me with their recent UI updates --
1. Changing default sorting order to 'most recent first'; I thought I was going insane at first when it happened
2. Making the comment box a floating page element so it always takes up about 25% screen real estate
I've been able to script these back to their old behavior but wouldn't it be nice if they added settings to toggle the behavior...
My company has been on Atlassian products for the past like 20 years so it'll be interesting to see whether we migrate to their cloud garbage or migrate off them altogether.
It’s a tricky balance. It would be easy for Atlassian to add settings. But every setting adds complexity. And I think we can all agree that we don’t want Jira to be more complex.
It takes a short time to adjust to UI changes, but settings live on forever.
Reading this news makes me happy because I know someone somewhere is likely going to be have the chance to argue that it's time to migrate away from JIRA and Confluence.
I personally they haveheld back nearly every organization I've worked for in some way or another over the last 15 years. These Atlassian products are the destroyers of enjoyment, satisfaction, project management and productivity.
Issues I've encountered with Confluence and JIRA:
* Painfully slow UI.
* The confusing UX for JIRA.
* The 100x ways to accomplish the same things in JIRA.
* The fact project managers always end up going back to a spreadsheets because JIRA doesn't cut it, even though they insist they need to continue using it.
* The way people bastardize every installation of JIRA it never seems to solve the problem it was designed to solve adequately, or because that was encouraged via "plugins".
* JIRA can't be upgraded because someone installed a plugin that cannot be upgraded too, but the whole org is dependent on some functionality from said plugin.
* The pathetic search in both product.
* The shitty editor in confluence I really cannot believe anyone is still interested in using it.
* Confluence not having support for Git or some similar version control system or pull-request like process support, making everyone to afraid to make changes to documentation.
* Confluece, errors, just blows up sometimes when I go to save a document.
I get that the plugins issues aren't entirely Atlassians fault in some ways ,but in others they are. I believe their plugin implementation allowed people to way too tightly integrate with the core product, not working like "integrations" but actually having the ability to break basic work flows. It was a huge mistake.
I personally use GH issues and projects and the simplicity of it is really fantastic, when I'm forced to go back to JIRA at work, I just feel that I cannot believe I get paid to waste time wrangling these products into doing something useful.
JIRA is like Salesforce or any large enterprise “customizable” software package - by default all it does is expose all the organizational chaos and insanity.
Funny because I'm mainly Salesforce developer who just quit my current job at least 1/3rd because it was stuck with Atlassian. Oh and I have no idea how can anyone use Salesforce either.
I stayed at a hotel that was having a massive cloud outage and I couldn't get my room key at check-in. That night I had dream that on-prem became the new cloud. State was beautifully synced with CRDTs. In this dream, systems never went down, the data just became temporarily stale. Then I woke up.
I stayed at a hotel that was having a power outage and they could not assign me a room because they couldn't tell which rooms were unoccupied. I guess the rooms themselves had some redundant power or was wired to a different grid. That night I had a dream about having room assignment logs sent to a printer. When the power went out there was a log to flip through so that there was a manual way to determine where everyone was staying in the hotel.
The problem with Jira is that we don't have many alternatives at enterprise level. Maybe for smaller teams (<1000 engineers) something else is at table. It's also interesting neither of FAANG - except for Netflix - are using Jira, they are all on something home-grown AFAIK.
I had a lot of hopes for Github Issues [0] but since they announced the product on last year's Universe event, there were not many news. Maybe this November they will come back with an update.
At this point, I feel Jira is like WordPress. It maybe slow and overbloated, but you can have absolutely any plugin and/or integration you can think of.
It's really hard to find any product or suite of products that replaces Atlassians offerings. Sure you can easily find a issue tracker product, but can it be a service desk at the same time? Bitbucket, Confluence and Jira also integrates really really well. You can have entire workflows that just makes sense, link to documentation, pull-requests/commits and tickets. I've frequently used this setup in a ITIL environment, entire workflows where you have tickets for test, staging and production deployments, the production deployment is a ticket that have the relevant pull-requests linked and the documentation is automatically updated because everything works together.
There's a number of companies offering "Jira replacements" at it's either just service desk features or a ticketing system, almost as if the authors never really used a full-blown Jira (/Atlassian) setup.
People complain a lot about the UI and speed of Atlassians products, but on-prem isn't really slow, even with a ton of plugins, but you do need trained staff to manage it. The UI is because of Jira doesn't really impose much in the way of restrictions on how to use it. You can basically mix and match anyway you like, service desk tickets mixed in with SCRUM workflows... doesn't mean you should, but you can.
You can configure JetBrains TeamCity to be a service desk and competent issue tracker, it also has a Confluence-style knowledge base in the latest versions.
Grafana Labs is using Github Projects and Issues for ~500 engineers that we have and the extended FOSS community contributing to projects like Grafana, Loki, Mimir, Tempo, and Pyroscope.
It is possible to do, I ack that we're below your 1k engineers threshold (though the OSS side is way above), but the problem isn't Github it's whether you (as an org) dictate a single SDLC that you enforce via a tool and as we aren't doing that and we're not yet encountering difficulties (beyond culture shock when people onboard and can't find what they're used to elsewhere, being Jira). By working with autonomy, and in fact embracing OSS and the community (meaning we can't hide info in internal Jira instances), it's easy to avoid Jira.
That's the rub though, many places do not want to give engineers autonomy like this.
At the enterprise level, I suppose you could be looking at IBM Rational or Microsoft Dynamics. I'm surprised ServiceNow isn't trying to break into this space. But with the amount of customization that ends up being demanded, I'm not surprised the big companies start rolling their own.
For smaller companies, there's so many choices out there, I can understand why it's hard to decide on one.
> I'm surprised ServiceNow isn't trying to break into this space.
Last time I ran SNOW a few years ago, it was slowly but steadily heading into the SAP trajectory - highly-customazible per customer needs, expensive to pay and even more expensive to migrate onto. And it doesn't seem to prioritize any developer-oriented features to appeal to that crowd.
ServiceNow’s current CEO is one of SAPs former CEOs. It’s become very heavy on sales culture. On the other hand, they’ve been trying to get customers to stop customizing core functionalities and adopt the platform’s processes. That’s probably not a bad thing overall.
Specific to this thread, though, they have much broader Github integrations available as well, including using git to manage apps authored in Studio, although there are some pain points.
More broadly, I wonder if anyone _really_ wants to be in this space if they’re not developing products specifically for developers as a core line of business. Dynamics and ServiceNow and other platforms and ERPs are great for reporting and tracking, but they often work in completely different ways than developer tooling does because they’re developed for fundamentally different roles.
> It's also interesting neither of FAANG - except for Netflix - are using Jira, they are all on something home-grown AFAIK.
And that might just be the sensible thing to do. I can imagine that from a certain size, the effort of building it yourself can payoff. Especially if you take into account all the lost productivity caused by Atlassian products.
Is this actually news? This seems to refer to something they did a while back, and is being repeated on the occasion of the deadline being 5 months away, rather than anything new being announced by Atlassian.
FWIW my place swallowed the DC charge for now, on the basis that we'd explore our options and possibly shift away.
Atlassian Data Center edition will continue to be supported. It is the same software as the Server offering but with a different product key unlocking some more features like multiple nodes. It is far more expensive than Server, but still cheaper than Atlassian Cloud. And I found the per-user pricing to be about on par with alternative products from other suppliers. But for small companies, the brittleness of the licence count tiers can really inflate the cost.
Thankful GitLab EE exists. What a nightmare for any companies who deal with M&A, finance, healthcare, etc. Sure, you can trust cloud providers not to get hacked. But I’d sooner have the option to unplug the Ethernet.
We(as in everyone) are in a serious need of a new git server product. Just do git serving, and do it well. Preferably in a way multiple nodes can be run active-active for scaling and reliability. No need for cicd (Jenkins is fine for that, thank you very much).
What are minimum viable features for me? Granular (per branch)
security access. Integration with AD federation and other auth providers(congnito, aws iam) and ability to give AD groups rights.
Web hooks sending and receiving. For example launch a merge request webhook(to lambda via aws api gateway, or to Jenkins). Receive a webhook as merge request approval when some Jenkins job finishes.
There is exactly zero need for your repository system also run cicd jobs. It ends up doing both tasks badly.
You'd like an example of said badness? Ok, how about this: in gitlab enterprise if you create cicd jobs/pipelines there is no way to giving someone an ability to run that pipeline without giving that person ability to push to the repository and submit merge requests. Yes, you can then set it so approval is needed before merge, protecting said pipeline, but why? There has been a ticket on gitlabs own issues page about it for years and it is still not resolved.
But wait, there is more... Gitlab enterprise has no mode of working that let's you have more than one active server at a time so goodbye horizontal scaling.
You want to scale your cicd worker nodes? They want you to use docker mashine(a deprecated product) instead of writing a Plugin like ec2-fleet for Jenkins.
It is obvious gitlab tries to funnel it's enterprise customers into saas.
As someone who managed hundreds of Jenkins instances from 2016 to 2018, Jenkins is now complete crap, stop using it. It was an ok product when the open source world offered no alternative but it's completely outdated compared to today's solutions. Deploying it sucks, its config as code format(s) are awful, the plugins are shit, upgrades can (and do) break everything, and I won't even saying anything about the design (not just the UI but also the UX and concepts).
None of the large companies I worked at used anything other than Jenkins for cicd (well in one place we did use azure devops server - back then called teams If I remember correctly, but that was just for one app development team).
Where they didn't use Jenkins they didn't have a dedicated cicd runner and they used github/gitlab instead. Both of these (although github less) suck for cicd IMO.
Concourse, Drone, Gitlab CI all work fine. I've also heard of GoCD that looks interesting and looks like an actual "Jenkins successor" (more than an alternative IMO), but I've never used it.
Thanks for your feedback. GitLab team member here.
> We(as in everyone) are in a serious need of a new git server product. Just do git serving, and do it well. Preferably in a way multiple nodes can be run active-active for scaling and reliability. No need for cicd (Jenkins is fine for that, thank you very much).
> Web hooks sending and receiving. For example launch a merge request webhook(to lambda via aws api gateway, or to Jenkins). Receive a webhook as merge request approval when some Jenkins job finishes.
You can trigger a pipeline from external webhooks using a trigger token, and execute an action against the GitLab REST API. The example for triggering pipelines in https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/triggers/#trigger-a-pipeline can be expanded into more actions, i.e. using the API to create MR approvals or comments.
> if you create cicd jobs/pipelines there is no way to giving someone an ability to run that pipeline without giving that person ability to push to the repository and submit merge requests. Yes, you can then set it so approval is needed before merge, protecting said pipeline, but why? There has been a ticket on gitlabs own issues page about it for years and it is still not resolved.
A developer role can create non-protected Git branches, merge requests, and as such trigger a pipeline from a merge request. You've mentioned approval rules as a safeguard already - CODEOWNERS can be an additional way to ensure that review workflows are followed. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/codeowners/
> You want to scale your cicd worker nodes? They want you to use docker mashine(a deprecated product) instead of writing a Plugin like ec2-fleet for Jenkins.
It's not the best for big organizations, but I've been quite happy with Gitea ever since the Gitlab pricing changes. Tons of features, rapid development, painless backup and upgrade process, and most importantly, very inexpensive to self host. If your team is in the low teens to low hundreds of people, it might already support your workflows!
Atlassian is a f...ing joke at that point. Their cloud offering seriously lags behind in features which means that there's a lot of third parties filling the gaps - e.g. Refined and My Requests, which are a must-have for anyone running Service Desk - and the admin side of configuring things still looks as ugly, weird and disjointed between their various services as it was eight years ago.
I wonder where they actually put in the billions of dollars they've raked in from their customers - from the looks of it, definitely not in the product, and also not in support given that it's very obvious that their first line of support is some Indian guys in a callcenter with the complete inability to do more than follow a badly written script.
They aren't abandoning it, they removed anything below 500 users e.g. $45k per year.
This is a huge fuck you to mid sized businesses that can't go into the cloud because of multiple reason such as certain plugins that cont be used etc. etc.
What is a business supposed to do? Pay the $45k or spend 10 times that to find a mediocre replacement that doesn't exit and go through the grueling process of getting out of a vendor lock in? Worst part is of the replacement isn't open source you end if up the same shit again.
It’s a shame that the options for orgs that don’t want Internet dependencies dwindle by the day. The poorly connected and security conscious get left behind again.
No disagreement there at all. Data center is pricey. I imagine if your company can afford some of the licenses on the other products to go non-Cloud such as BitBucket or Bamboo then that may be your answer.
I don't think we have a clear path at the moment, but there's no appetite to move off Atlassian as processes have developed around it over the previous decade. The assumption is that eventually we'll be forced onto their cloud offerings. I assume we'll be running unsupported server versions for at least a time, but we do have them fairly well isolated at least. I have a feeling we're not unique.
no amount of complaints from... everyone about jira/confluence being absurdly slow or horrible to use had any effect on my employer (large multinational)
but their decision to abandon on-prem has resulted in the company migrating away from all atlassian products
But they're not abandoning on-premise, though one could get that impression from the tone of the article.
They are only dropping the small-business targeted Server tier, they are keeping the enterprise targeted Datacenter tier. It's pretty much a drop-in replacement, with extra capabilities. And annual payment instead of initial+upgrades payment.
We just chatted with Atlassian and just installed a pretty large on-prem env. (mandatory to meet restrictions), and think this title is misleading in that you can still buy supported on-prem server products, with support licenses. Will the focus of dev. be for their cloud products? 100% - TBH who isn't doing this now-adays (cough MSFT etc.)
RANT: This force to cloud is total BS though and the S*T that Postman just pulled reinforces my general disdain for 'forced' cloud. Hopefully comps. will realize this and fill this spot in the market. RANTOFF
Atlassian is just asking for someone to come along and eat their lunch. Issue tracking and wiki/knowledge base software aren't exactly products with trade secrets.
I suspect that many server vendors are trying to go this way.
It actually makes a lot of business sense. It can have more to do with controlling the brand, and consolidating support, than just screwing over customers.
But I got fairly sick of Atlassian's stuff, many years ago, so it isn't my monkey, and isn't my circus.
We're continuing to build more and more service desk projects in Jira Service Management. That's becoming a killer feature for our business teams like HR, Finance, Marketing, and others. For us Jira Software is the 'other child' these days with JSM really taking front and center.
It doesn’t make them as much money (and on-premise continues for data center licenses so they wanna milk that, too).
Atlassian support has been decent to good and I’ve rarely had to even contact them, you could almost always find what you needed on the support site or via a search.
At this point the decision has been made in our org to firewall their products off the internet and internal networks, and migrate to something else by 2024.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=atlassian
[2] https://confluence.atlassian.com/security/cve-2023-22515-pri...