As you will have noticed, Atlassian tools evolve quickly (too quickly for some people!). It can be hard to follow the speed, especially if you have custom plugins or specific development. Atlassian has a strict end of life policy, which we’ll explain here:
Once an Atlassian product reaches its end of life, you are no longer eligible for support on this product using support.atlassian.com. Essentially, you will be told that you need to upgrade your product to fix your problem.
Atlassian supports all of their products for 2 years after the release of the last minor version (security patches don’t count).
For example, JIRA 4.3 was released on March 16, 2011. Given that JIRA 4.3.4 was released on May 27, 2011, the end of life of JIRA 4.3 (all minor versions) is on May 27, 2013 and not on March 16, 2013. So, if you upgrade today to JIRA 5.2, you won’t have to worry for more than 2 years, because the last minor version is not fixed until a new major release is out (JIRA 6.0 as it happens).
Confluence 3.4 and JIRA 4.2 end their lives respectively 5 and 4 days ago; this is the opportunity to catch the Atlassian high-speed train and upgrade!
If you still use Confluence 3, you will be able to use the brand new text editor, more flexible and faster. If you still use JIRA 4, you will get a huge performance improvement. Also, don’t forget that Confluence 5 and JIRA 6 are to be released soon so there’s no time to lose if you want to do easy upgrades.
For more information about Atlassian end of life policy, see this page.
