Atlassian’s Move To Cloud Only Means Customers Face Integration Issues And More

Atlassian is discontinuing its datacenter products, including Jira, Confluence and Bamboo, in favor of Atlassian Cloud. There is a partial exception for Bitbucket, a source code repository manager, which will have a license option covering both cloud and datacenter.

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The official post states that “nearly all our new customers” are choosing cloud and that there are benefits in AI search, chat and automation, thanks to its Rovo offering.

Sales of new datacenter subscriptions cease on March 30 2026, new licenses for existing customers end on March 30 2028, and all licenses expire on March 28, 2029, designated as “end of life.”

Bitbucket datacenter will remain available via a hybrid license option, the reason given being that “source code is particularly sensitive.” There is also a get-out for certain customers with “unique circumstances” though the nature of these is not specified.

Migration options include self-service tools aimed at organizations with fewer than 1000 users, and a FastShift program involving a dedicated Atlassian team for larger organizations.

Timeline for Atlassian datacenter end of life

There are compliance issues for some customers, including US government users requiring FedRAMP (Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program), for which the company has incomplete support. Atlassian is adding a FedRAMP moderate-authorized government cloud, has an Atlassian Isolated Cloud single-tenant offering, and promises to submit FedRAMP high impact environments for authorization before the datacenter end of life.

Will customer moving to cloud pay more? Atlassian quotes a case study showing a cost saving of 36 percent; but Rodney Nissen, an independent Atlassian consultant, reckons that “on average, we can expect those who migrate from DC to Cloud to pay around 28 percent more,” and in practice even more than that because of added-cost options such as Atlassian Guard which may become necessary. It is only customers with 10,000 or fewer users who may save money.

Atlassian’s self-managed server products went end of life last year, and the news will be a blow to those who migrated from server to datacenter, and who now face a second migration.

Although most customers are already on cloud, those who are not have good reasons. “As we have deep integrations / interfaces to our legacy systems, we cannot migrate to cloud (tested this a lot and it does not work). For us this will mean: bye bye Atlassian,” said one on the vendor’s community forum, adding that in March an Atlassian employee had said there were no plans to end the datacenter products.

“The way datacenter customers have been treated over the past few years with rising costs and now a relatively abrupt end-of-life announcement is frustrating,” said another.

Any good news? The Atlassian ecosystem has been in “a bit of a slump,” said Nissen, but there will be more work for partners “as companies that moved to or stayed on DC now scramble to get to the cloud or some other platform.” ®

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