Atlassian announces “End of Sale” and “End of Support” for servers

Summary: Last Friday, Atlassian announced a consolidation of its license offering, focusing on both cloud and data center platforms. The Server deployment option will be discontinued within the next three years. Read here what this means and how Meelogic, as an authorized Atlassian Solution Partner, can help you migrate to the cloud or data center.

For us as Atlassian Solution Partner, this development comes a little bit earlier than expected, but overall it is the logical consequence of the “cloud-first” approach that Atlassian has been following for several years. Last Friday, October 16, 2020, the time had come. Via blog post Scott Farquhar, one of the two Atlassian founders, announces the end for the server variant. In a little more than three years, more precisely as of February 02, 2024, the end is to be finally reached. Atlassian will no longer sell any new licenses for the platform server from February 02, 2021. Anyone who uses servers today can continue to work with them for another 3 years without restrictions. However, there will be further developments only for the remaining platforms.

What will change for server customers
Atlassian has announced the following changes for its server products on 10/16/202020

• End of Sale from 02 February 2021 (No new server products can be purchased after this date. At the same time there will be a price change for Server Upgrade and Renewal licenses.)
• End of user tier upgrades and downgrades from February 02, 2022
• End of new marketplace app sales from February 02, 2023
• End of Support as of February 02, 2024 (support and troubleshooting for all server products will be discontinued as of this date)

Massive investments in “cloud” and “data center

With this decision Atlassian underlines its “cloud-first” strategy. The company is well aware that this decision will not meet with a positive response from all customers. Farquahr believes that some may find the transition difficult. However, the focus on the remaining platforms should lead to even faster and continuous improvement of the products in the long term.

Atlassian has already been investing massively in its Software-as-a-Service offering for several years. Customers can create a new instance within minutes. With up to 10 users and fewer features in the “Free Plan”, this is now even possible without any costs. From an economic point of view in particular, the cloud offers decisive advantages, as there are no costs for hardware, hosting or maintenance.

However, it is in the nature of things that cloud customers, compared to on-premise customers, give up a bit of self-determination to the service provider. New features, for example, cannot simply be turned off or programmed away. Cloud users also have little or no control over the timing of the introduction of some changes. These are the things you have to accept if you don’t want to burden yourself with the issue of hosting.

Also in terms of individualization, the possibilities are limited compared to a system that is operated on your own infrastructure. However, this can also be an advantage. A system in which not every bit and byte can be turned inside out gives those responsible much more time to focus on the essentials, namely the content, its organization and the (automated?) processes around it.

Atlassian Trust Center

However, Atlassian’s investment in its cloud service is not just in technology for more and better features, higher availability and faster performance. Atlassian also had to make some changes in terms of legal certainty, as the important European market in particular was threatening to lose touch with the cloud. At the Atlassian Trust Center at https://www.atlassian.com/de/trust, Atlassian provides its customers with all information on data protection, compliance, reliability and security.

Migration discounts and support

Atlassian offers loyalty discounts to eligible customers to upgrade to cloud products. In addition, the Atlassian Migration Program (AMP) is designed to provide step-by-step instructions, free migration tools, a dedicated migration support team and a free trial of cloud migration for the duration of the remaining server maintenance of up to 12 months.

With all the legal certainty and migration support offerings, and with the help of Solution Partners, there will always be reasons for companies to operate a system “behind the firewall”. For these customers, Atlassian continues to offer the data center version of its products. Atlassian also provides technical and price support for migration to data centers from servers.