Introducing Jira Data Center

One of the biggest challenges users often face with Jira Server is scalability. When an organization’s Jira deployment grows to thousands of concurrent users and hundreds of thousands of issues, they will often start to experience performance issues, such as slower response times. While each new major release would include performance improvements, customers often had to archive and export old projects to another Jira instance or split up their one big instance into several smaller instances.

Some organizations can resolve this problem by migrating to the Jira Cloud offering. However, not everyone can move to the public cloud due to security, regulations, and other reasons, or they prefer to run Jira in their private cloud. This is where Jira Data Center comes in.

Jira Data Center is the new offering from Atlassian that replaces the old Jira Server and aims to address challenges that are often faced by organizations that need their Jira deployment to be performant, scalable, highly available, and secure.

With Jira Data Center, you can continue to host Jira yourself, with the aforementioned added benefits. Many additional features are added, such as support for Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), Advanced Roadmaps for planning, and improved administrative functions.

Additional information

You can find a full list of differences between the old Jira Server and Jira Data Center at https://confluence.atlassian.com/enterprise/jira-server-and-data-center-feature-comparison-953651628.html.

So, how does Jira Data Center achieve all these benefits and improvements? Unlike Jira Server, where you have a single instance of Jira running, Jira Data Center allows you to run multiple Jira instances together as a single deployment, called a cluster. The following diagram illustrates a typical Jira Data Center deployment:

Figure 1.1 – Jira Data Center deployment

You will have one or more Jira instances, called nodes, running in a single cluster. All the Jira nodes will connect to the same database and file server, with a load balancer to distribute the traffic across all the nodes. This way, you have more computing power shared across the cluster, and you can add another node to the cluster at any time to add additional capacity.

Another good feature of Jira Data Center is that you do not need to run a cluster if you are not ready. You can run your deployment with a single node as a standalone, just as you would with the previous Jira Server. Then, when you need to, you can always convert your deployment into a cluster. Doing so gives you flexibility, as well as all the additional features that have been introduced in Jira Data Center. With a good understanding of Jira Data Center, let’s look at what we will need for deployment.