As an organization, your needs and requirements change as you grow. For example, finding an enterprise-grade solution that scales may be a top priority because you have more users accessing your applications. You may already be experiencing application downtime or performance degradation and lack the ability to scale your applications. When you’ve hit this point, it’s important that you find a solution that not only scales to meet your user demand, but one that’s reliable.
But it might not just be about scaling. Security and compliance may be your largest concern. With more users accessing your applications, remaining in compliance and being aware of potential security concerns becomes more difficult. Your organization needs something that shows how users are using your application, while also building off of industry standards and software that is already available in your tech stack. Atlassian Partner services in Singapore built Data Center, their self-managed enterprise edition, to support Server customers, in the next stage of your organization’s journey. This guide will give you everything you need to get up to speed on Data Center and how it can support you as you scale. You’ll get a deep dive into Data Center features and a rundown on what it takes to prepare for and successfully upgrade to Data Center.
What comes with Data Center products?
Atlassian Data Center, enterprise edition, provides features and capabilities in the following areas:
Compliance, governance, and security
User management and controls
Infrastructure and operations
Scale, performance, and availability
Apps and extensibility
Compliance, governance, and security
As your organization grows, the number of regulations that your organization has to comply with increases. Data Center products help you gain insight into your organization, maintain compliance, and identify potential risks. Two key features that Data Center products offer are:
· Advanced Auditing
· Allow listing / Block listing
Advanced auditing
Tracking and logging actions in an instance can help you demonstrate compliance, improve security, and better manage risk, while also giving your admins the visibility they need to monitor the state of the business.
With advanced auditing, you can opt into different levels of coverage (off, base, advanced, full) on a per coverage area basis. This means you can select what is right for you, your organization and it’s scale. Each different logging level enables you to gain different a more in-depth insight into events that occur within your instance. Any logs that are generated by advanced auditing are temporarily stored on your database for short term storage. Admins can quickly diagnose what’s changed recently within their instances and projects. Database storage is limited by a retention period and has a cap of 10 million records so that it doesn’t cause performance issues, but you can customize your database retention period.
Allow-listing / Block listing
As a long term storage solution, advanced auditing is also built with file externalization. File externalization allows you to integrate with your third-party monitoring tools, such as Splunk. Copies of your logs are then sent to your monitoring software and stored there for long term storage. This means that your team can leverage tools that you already have.
Your data is valuable and requires additional considerations to make sure that it’s secure. Data security isn’t just about protecting it from a security threat. You also want to make sure that the correct people are seeing the data, while also reducing the number of people with access to the data who don’t need to see it. With the rate limiting capability, you can develop rules around what users you want to allow access to your data by using allow-listing. You can also adjust user limits based on the roles and workflows of individuals in your organization. In Jira or Confluence, you can define which people you want to block from accessing your data.
User management and controls
Users access multiple applications daily to do their job. It’s critical that they are able to sign into these applications securely. As your organization grows, managing the usernames and passwords of everyone in your organization who accesses those applications becomes increasingly difficult. Data Center products support two different types of user management authentication methods:
· SAML
· OpenID Connect
SAML
Each of the core Data Center products includes support for SAML, which allows each application to connect to an IdP to provide single sign-on (SSO). To grant access to your applications or authorizations, such as verifying that users belong to the correct groups or roles, you can use either your user directory or applications. Atlassian currently performs tests with the following identity providers:
OpenID Connect (OIDC)
Each of the core Data Center products includes support for SAML, which allows access to an authentication layer on top of the OAuth 2.0 authorization framework. OIDC is quickly emerging as a standard for SSO and identity provisions.
OIDC is an identity layer on top of the OAuth 2.0 framework that verifies user identities based on the authentication performed by the authorization server. This authentication gathers basic user profile information. For example, if you log on to a site and you’re given the option to login using your Google account, that’s OIDC. The site will contact the Google authentication server to collect your credentials.
This is different than SAML, which relies on an explicit trust between the site and the identity provider (IdPs). Let’s say you wanted to use your corporate intranet to connect to Salesforce. SAML uses an XML-based standard to exchange authentication and authorization data between the site and trusted IdPs. Thus, it’s independent of OAuth 2.0.
Infrastructure and operations
You have a lot of choices to make when it comes to building out the infrastructure of your organization. Data Center products give you the flexibility you need to deploy them in an environment that meets your organizations requirements. Here are two key areas that Data Center offers infrastructure automation and flexibility:
· Infrastructure choices
· Docker images
· Amazon Aurora support
Infrastructure choices
We are finding that more and more of our customers are choosing to deploy Atlassian tools using infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers. In fact, 45% of those customers are running on a cloud provider. You have the option to deploy Atlassian Data Center using Amazon Web Services (Aws cloud services in Singapore) or Microsoft Azure.
These vendors also provide a number of managed services out-of-the-box with your Data Center instance and automatically handle all the configuration and maintenance.
Docker container images
As your teams become more distributed, creating a consistent environment becomes incredibly important. Traditional software upgrades can take time and sometimes cause something in your environment to break. With container images, everything required to upgrade your application is included in the file and upgrading is as simple as a download. With Data Center, you can replicate your application nodes across any hardware by leveraging Docker container images. This gives you the flexibility to add additional nodes that match the nodes that you’ve already built. You can deploy official container images in virtually identical environments across architectures — allowing you to seamlessly replicate your nodes across any of your available hardware.
Amazon Aurora support
Data Center products support Amazon Aurora, a highly-available database, which provides an additional layer of resilience across your full application stack. Amazon Aurora leverages a distributed database cluster for higher fault tolerance. The increased uptime from Amazon Aurora enables a reliable experience for your end-users, optimized workflows for your admins, and durable infrastructure built to easily manage loads as your team grows over time.
Scale, performance, and availability
One of the most important things that people look for in an enterprise or enterprise-grade solution is its reliability and it’s ability to scale. and perform, especially as your organization becomes globally distributed. As your organization grows, that need becomes much more urgent. You can’t have your applications down for extended periods of time, disrupting your team’s work. To provide enhanced scale, performance, and availability, Data Center products are built with the following capabilities:
· Clustering for high availability
· Clustering for horizontal scaling
· Disaster recovery
· Content Delivery Network (CDN)
· Rate limiting
Ensuring high availability is especially critical when your teams rely on Atlassian tools to get their work done. Incidents happen. Whether it’s as a result of natural or human-induced circumstances, downtime causes productivity and revenue losses. Avoiding any potential downtime is critical to success. With Atlassian Data Center’s active-active clustering model, you can ensure your teams always have access to the tools they need to do their job.
Disaster recovery
Applications that help your teams run are mission-critical and you should create a disaster recovery plan for every tool your organization relies on. A disaster recovery plan describes how your organization can continue to work without reducing further interruption and who can help mitigate any further risk in the event of a disaster. With the Data Center, your team can set up cold standby instances in the event of a disaster. As long as you have an active Data Center license, you will not need to purchase additional or separate licenses to start up your Data Center products or instances on a cold standby instance.
To get started, your team will need to create a standby system without starting it up. Then, you’ll need to implement a data replication strategy. Replicating data to your standby location is crucial to a cold standby strategy. You don’t want to failover to your standby instance and find that it’s out of date or that it will take many hours to re-index your database(s).
Apps and extensibility
Your apps are just as mission-critical as your organization’s tools. If your apps aren’t working the right way, then your team can’t get work done. To ensure that you get the enterprise-grade experience that you expect from your apps, Atlassian does the following:
· App development and testing criteria for Data Center
· APIs for marketplace partners to build enhanced capabilities in DC apps
Before an app is approved for Data Center use, Marketplace vendors are required to build and test their apps to a more rigorous standard. This includes testing how they handle cache operations, whether they support required databases, if you can implement locking and availability in clustered environments, manage event handlers, and much more. Data Center apps are tested on one, two, and four nodes to make sure that they can work in a clustered environment. All test results must be submitted to Atlassian for a complete review and verification. Only the apps that have met these requirements will receive a “Data Center” listing on the Atlassian Marketplace.
What does your team need to move to Data Center?
The only component that you’re required to have to upgrade to Data Center is a database. Odds are you’d be able to use the same database configuration in Data Center that you’re currently using with your Server instance. For a complete list of databases that are supported by Data Center, see Atlassian Support.
By upgrading to Data Center using just a database and the license key, you’ll deploy your Data Center products in a non-clustered environment. Want to deploy Data Center in a clustered environment? You’ll need a few additional components:
· Load balancer
· Application nodes
· File system
The load balancer is the first thing that your users’ requests hit if you’ve deployed in a cluster. Requests come into the load balancer and the load balancer then distributes each request to the application nodes. Data Center supports both hardware and software-based load balancers. For both software and hardware solutions, the load balancer should be connected to the application cluster using a high-speed LAN connection to ensure high bandwidth and low latency. All software load balancers should run on dedicated machines.
How do I upgrade to Data Center?
When you finally decide it’s time to move to Data Center, you’ll need to put together an upgrade plan. You’ll want to front-load as much staffing, planning, and decision-making as possible to manage problems as they arise throughout the process. It’s important to remember, however, that not every upgrade is the same, so some steps may not apply to your organization.
1 Build a project team
One of the most important parts of upgrading to Data Center is assembling the right team as early as possible.
When assembling your team, it’s important to keep in mind that every organization is like a snowflake: unique but with similar patterns. We see many different team configurations based on staff availability, skill sets, staff seniority, and organizational structure. You may find that one person can cover multiple areas of expertise, or that you need to extend your team. While there’s no definitive answer to which roles and how many roles should be included, you can use this as a guide to help you determine the right people in your organization for the project.
Document current processes
After application tuning, it’s time to document your Server environment. This documentation can help guide configuration decisions in your Data Center deployment, influence process modifications, and determine whether issues found after deployment are new or already existing.
Evaluate technology decisions
Getting ahead of the technology decisions will speed up the design of a production-ready environment for your Data Center products that is tailored to your organization’s needs. Whether you’re going to deploy your Data Center products in a clustered or non-clustered environment, look at the infrastructure you’re currently using to run your applications and consider if it makes sense for you to deploy on AWS, Azure, or your own hardware. If you decide to deploy in a clustered environment, you’ll need to start assessing the additional components you will need, such as a load balancer, file system, and application nodes. Take a moment to determine what you have available or what you may have to purchase.
Implement and test your deployment process
We’re done with the planning. Now it’s time for action. Before you deploy, make sure you’ve evaluated and determined the team, technology, and other key factors we’ve already mentioned.
If you’ve chosen to deploy your Data Center applications in a clustered environment, you’ll need to build your cluster before you can upgrade.
It’s time to build your Data Center cluster. In addition to setting up each of the various components in your cluster (application nodes, load balancer, database, file system), you also need to size the application nodes in your cluster based on your performance requirements.
Finally, in order to confidently deploy Data Center to production, you should run through an iterative set of functional tests, integration tests, and performance tests to vet your Data Center installation. Be prepared for the future and take the right steps now to maintain and scale your environment down down the line.