Atlassian products probably are the best tools you can use when you need to build agility into a growing enterprise. Tools such as Jira Software, Confluence, Jira Service Desk and Bitbucket can start out as single-instances but eventually workloads increase and performance will be affected. Also, the instances will need some form of data and system protection.
Fortunately Atlassian platforms can grow with the company’s business needs. Data Center products are enterprise-level solutions to scale your Jira workloads and protect the applications from downtime, outages and disasters. In this following blog article, we will look at how the technology behind the Atlassian solution makes your applications enterprise-grade through the use of scalable clusters.
High Availability and scalability
Data Center provides high availability (HA) with active clustering and automatic host failover within the data center. Data Center nodes are distributed for redundancy and HA, which protects against the kind of downtime that is costly to any business.
In a data center configuration, you have multiple server nodes with a typical cluster starting with at least two nodes. Clusters can grow in size and the use of load balancing technology helps to evenly distribute workloads across nodes for improved performance and better utilization. Compute and storage power increases as more nodes are added, so the usage capacity is increased. Also, traffic can be distributed to a specific node (For instance REST API traffic ) to manage the workloads.
Clusters can be designed in an active-active configuration for high availability systems so if a node crashes then another node automatically takes on the other’s workloads to minimize disruption to end-users or applications. If a node fails, the load balancing capability redirects sessions to the live nodes in high availability systems.
Minimizing downtime
A cluster builds redundancy to eliminate a single-point-of-failure, which is important for high availability systems and companies recovering from outages or disasters.
Data Center offers resiliency, while keeping the services running for a seamless user experience. What often starts as a small scale operation in a specific team becomes mission critical across many parts of the organization as more teams become involved in projects. This means any downtime can affect more than just your IT team, it affects productivity.
Data Center versions offer Zero Downtime Upgrades for minimizing any planned or unplanned disruption. For instance, the zero downtime upgrades capability in Jira Software Data Center allows you to run clustered nodes when they are on different versions of a Jira Software, so you can upgrade one Jira instance while other nodes continue to provide service to users.
Ease of deployment
Data Center solutions can be installed in-house, using traditional IT stacks. But it can also be deployed in the cloud like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. What’s more, it can be done using templates, hence reducing the amount of grunt work necessary for a typical cluster deployment. You can provide consistent performance and instantly scale to more users. It also provides Quality of Service (QoS) targets to specific teams by dedicating nodes to specific traffic types.
You can easily configure and deploy the following configuration using a CloudFormation template:
This kind of deployment can take about 20 minutes and scales automatically. If you reach a threshold on a two node-cluster, a third will be added without the need to take your system offline. Data Center products have the same end-user features as the single server products. Data Center also provides authentication control to critical applications with SAML 2.0 and integration with enterprise identity providers.
Atlassian provides documentation in this area to help design and implement Data Center solutions. However, Valiantys offers services to further help you with these kinds of configurations. If you need more assistance, reach out to us and we can provide an Atlassian certified consultant to assist you.
Contact Us
