Valiantys Hosting
  • Article
  • Jul.9.2014

How to choose your JIRA or Confluence hosting?

  • Jul.9.2014
  • Reading time mins

Whether JIRA or Confluence are becoming essential applications within your company as a result of a top management decision, or because they are progressively finding their way in your organisation after a project team used them, you are now facing administration challenges.

Choosing the right platform architecture and related services requires in-depth thinking. There is not one good solution but several solutions, each of them addressing a specific need.

In this article, I will give my best insights on Atlassian hosting based on 10 years of ground-field experience. You will find a few ideas to mature and key questions to help you  find the right solution for your needs.

Why a hosted solution?

This is a wide question. In my opinion there are two main aspects to take into account:

Virtualization and system admin

Today, the Cloud – either private or public – is the most efficient solution for platforms hosting. However, having your platform up and running does not guarantee your application software will work just fine too. If you have been hacked once, you probably have a precise idea of how valuable a system administration team is.

The first question to answer is:

Do we have enough internal resources to administer your server?
Standards and processes of your system teams might be different from Atlassian specifications: remember to check these to make sure your platform will be well hosted. Standards being standards, it is not always possible to obtain an exception or an evolution of these processes. 

Which raises a second question:

Is installing tools such as the one of Atlassian going to work on our infrastructure? 

Cost and performance

Why is JIRA or Confluence implemented in your company? To collaborate, discuss, share information, facilitate internal process through relevant tools… What matters to you is simply to use the tool, not to administer it. Adopting a hosted solution is making the choice of simplicity, fast implementation, and also focusing on your activity thanks to the support of experts.

Let’s question the following: 

Is it really cheaper for us to have an internal solution? Are we going to become more efficient?

Identify your priority criteria

What type of instance do we want? What do we want to implement? For how long?

Clarity and accuracy of your answers to these questions are key points to ensure the success of your project management and acceptance of the end users.

Indeed, server architecture and related services will clearly be different if we instantiate a demo project (Proof of Concept) or an issue tracking service on a critical application.

What will change? Which criteria should be taken into account? That’s what we are going to see with the analysis elements below:

  • Technical performance

Memory and resources dedicated to your servers are directly linked to the performance of your application. An evaluation of the data volume and of the memory your application will have to support will keep your system away from problems. Is your server able to support your need?

  • Safety

Behaviour, design and implementation of the platform contribute to decrease the probability of threats and reduce hacking. Is your data confidential? Are the flows encrypted? Is your application protected enough against hacking or intrusions? What will happen to your data once the service is over? All levels of safety are possible depending on the budget allocated.

  • Availability and reliability

Is the application critical for your activity? Which level of unavailability are you ready to accept? In case of breakdown, how should the system react? Which mechanisms should be implemented? What will be the process for maintenance?

  • Customisation

JIRA and Confluence are highly configurable software, as a consequence you will almost certainly have to install add-ons to adapt the tool to your activity. This is a major element to foresee because all hosted solutions do not allow it, and this can become a blocker very quickly.

  • Expertise

You are now in possession of a brand new JIRA or Confluence. However are you sure that you know how to properly administer your application? A bad administration can ruin an operational application on an adapted server. Thus, we are back to the question: “why do I use this tool, how do I use it and how is it likely to evolve?” Need some help for customisation? For functional support? For an admin training? For an audit of your platform? These are the needs you might have to address. Who better than an expert can help you with it?

  • Speed of deployment

Implementing a packaged VM can require several hours while a dedicated server can require days of work. As a rule, the speed of deployment is inversely related to the availability expected from the application.

With all of these criteria, you can now define your priorities and match your needs and budget with the hosting plans of the market.

Hosting with Valiantys?

We built our hosting plans based on our experience in consulting and feedbacks of our clients.

Today, we offer 3 packaged hosting  solutions. Each of them has been designed to answer specific needs: Starter, Standard and Enterprise.

Here are the weighted criteria per offer:

Starter Standard Enterprise
Technical Performance * *** *****
Safety *** **** *****
Availability and Reliability ** *** *****
Customisation ***** **** ****
Expertise * *** *****
Speed of deployment ***** **** ***

 

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