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Atlassian 2021 Cloud Roadmap Summary

From an Atlassian point of view, 2020 was an exciting year and a lot of good things are scheduled for 2021 as well. Atlassian presented their cloud roadmap for 2021 that includes a lot of developments for their SaaS offering.

This is not surprising as with Atlassian’s recent announcements of focusing more on their Cloud offering, we already see many clients starting in the cloud. Additionally a lot of our customers are preparing to migrate from server to cloud as the Atlassian toolstack remains a strong offering.

That’s why we want to guide, advise and help the readers of our blogs to make the transition to cloud as smooth as possible. But also to let you know what is in store for you this year and make our customers confident in the transition to the cloud.

Our Atlassian experts have compiled the most relevant highlights of the Atlassian cloud roadmap and share them with you in this blog post.

This is also to entice existing server customers in boarding onto the cloud and keep them up-to-date on the latest developments.

A full and detailed list of planned features can be found here. If you still have any questions on the roadmap, feel free to contact us to so we can guide you in these exciting times.

Data residency for all cloud plans and add-ons

“Do I have a choice where Atlassian will store my (in app) data?” This is one of the hottest topics for most of our EU customers and the number one topic our clients have been asking for!

Good news! Atlassian have announced that this will become available for all their cloud plans later this year in Q3/Q4. Not only for native apps but also for 3rd party add-ons. This should alleviate most of the showstoppers for our EU based customer who value their Intellectual Property and privacy.

Enabling easy transition to Cloud

Migrating your vanilla and out-of-the-box Jira Software, Jira Service Management or Confluence to the cloud was relatively simple. However with 3rd party add-ons and custom integrations things can get complicated very quickly. As we have described in this blog.

Atlassian will make things easier this year. Announced for this year are the following improvements

  • Marketplace app migration. Migrate your app data to the cloud!
  • Support for roadmap function migration
  • Cloud to Cloud migration support
  • Confluence: Team Calenders and Questions data migrations supported
  • Bitbucket cloud migration assistant. Make it easy to not only migrate repositories but also project, pull requests and permission settings from Server and or DataCenter to Cloud.

Improved tools for Administrators

We know system administrators on server like the steady state of their environment with no unexpected changes. Atlassian is bringing this kind of functionality to the cloud as well. With the option to at least have more control on roll-out but also to have a sandbox to dry-run any changes in your production environment. Further on: more control and views on what is going on in the environment on user/admin/configurations.

  • Release Tracks, opt-in to regular fixed intervals upgrades instead of continuous roll-outs
  • Sandbox to test changes upfront separated from production
  • One dashboard for active usage, license utilization and security indicators
  • Archiving of Jira and Confluence projects/spaces
  • Move fine grained admin roles for billing, user management, product configurations and more
  • One place to manage and view user permissions over multiple cloud instances

Improved Cloud Performance and Security

Performance and Security are two very important topics for Atlassian when it comes to cloud. Therefore they are also working on improving their infrastructure to make it more secure and responsive. This is something that all organizations will be happy to benefit from.

  • Many clients, specially coming from server, noticed that Cloud was not up to par with server in performance terms. Atlassian is working steadily on improving the performance on Cloud. By setting up local content providers and a number of other improvement their goal is to improve the load times up to 1.5x by the end of 2021!
  • Apps store is scanned for known security vulnerabilities
  • Provide support for multiple Identity providers

Application Improvements

Besides the overall and general improvements on speed and security there were also a number of application specifics items on the roadmap. We list the highlights on a per-app basis.

Confluence

  • Template Previews when selecting them upon creating a page
  • Inline comments now show while in edit mode!
  • Having projects in Confluence with external or 3rd party users that need to collaborate? Atlassian will provide functionality to collaborate in Confluence without compromising on security. Read all about the improve security further on this blog.

Jira

  • New filters for backlogs and boards
  • Possibility to calculate recommended sprint targets and improvements
  • Integrate Jira with other data sources

Jira Service Management (previously known as Jira Service Desk)

  • Incorporate Insight Asset Management into Jira Service management. Teams will be able to search assets, improve how they are shown and incorporate them into workflows
  • Support for hybrid deployment, i.e. Service Management Cloud connecting to Server/Data Center Jira and or Confluence

Bitbucket

  • Support for building Windows Apps using Bitbucket Pipelines
    • Including more details build metrics. Allowing to monitor each step of your build.
  • Hybrid (Server vs Cloud) deployment without the need for opening your firewall
    • Allows pipeline builds to run on-prem by defining a pipeline runner locally
  • Apply changes to configuration and access lists across multiple repositories at a time.
  • Improved pull requests, allowing the user to mark files that have been reviewed or need further attention.
  • Support for Repositories > 2GB
  • Data will also be encrypted on site instead of transit only. Adding even more security.

Conclusion

From a partner point of view it can be concluded that Atlassian is going full throttle on their cloud development. 2021 and the years beyond are expected to bring a lot in terms of features, performance, security and easy of use. Of course you can always contact us if you have any (support) questions. We offer Server to Cloud migration services and support contract to cover your upgrades. Based on your wishes and needs we perform a health-check and tooling upgrade one or more times per year. Of course we also pro-actively inform you of any security critical updates. Please feel free to reach out to us if you want to receive more information about our services. Stay safe and Godspeed…. The ALM Team.

Daan van der Stek

Director Application Lifecycle Management, Netherlands

Tel: +31 (0)6 10 17 88 62

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