As the person responsible for running Jira and Confluence on premises at my employer I‘m looking forward for the next time one of their sales droids contacts me to make us move to their cloud services (despite me stating that we are not interested multiple times)…
It's insane. Since they've all but killed off on-premise Jira and Confluence, they've been spamming me regularly trying to convince me to "upgrade" to the cloud. Eventually I gave in and replied to them asking two simple questions.
One is that we've had many bad reports from partners that Jira Cloud is incredibly slow, even when compared to the already underperforming Jira Server and I wonder what their performance guarantees are. The other one is that it's so, so pricey.
It helped, but not in the way I thought it would! There's been no reply, but also no more spam emails now!
I haven’t used Jira Cloud in any great depth, but I did play around with it as part of trialling the free plan and was amused that you could quite easily come across warnings to backup your installation and consult your system administrator before proceeding…how exactly do I do that for a cloud service? Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
At my last job we used Bitbucket Cloud and that was awful. Dog slow, ridiculously low threshold for being unable to render diffs, and constant incidents. We used to joke that they could make the “Bitbucket is experiencing an incident” banner a permanent fixture on the page and it would be right more often than it was wrong.
We’re still using on-prem Jira at my current job, but we just migrated away from on-prem Bitbucket to GitHub, as Bitbucket was becoming infeasible and the cloud offering is a bad joke.
But slowness isn't really the problem, the problem is that it's unpredictable.
I wait for the interface to be fully loaded, so I click on a text box and i start typing. Then FU--ING something takes the focus to some other element in the web page and now i'm typing random shortcuts (like reassigning tickets, changing status or whatever).
It's painfully slow but the real problem is that it's unpredictable in its behaviour.
>now i'm typing random shortcuts (like reassigning tickets, changing status or whatever).
This happens to me often and it's absolutely infuriating. I'd prefer a blocking spinning wheel of death over that nonsense. It's all but ensured that I'll be looking elsewhere when choosing project tracking software in the future.
Well you’re just a user, what do you know anyhow? It’s not like paying money for a service entitles you to be able to have something which works and delivers what you paid for. In fact, if you look at the EULA I’m positive that it states you’re paying to access the almighty godlike code of Jira.
Also if you don’t like it, simply construct your own industry standard and train your users on it, maintain it, and keep the costs down!.
I think software companies need to have a serious “Come to Jesus” talk with their users about who needs to control what.
My employer recently switched from on-prem to cloud. The cloud service is insanely slow, or maybe it's my aging Macbook, but every single component on the page seems to have to load separately. (It's a newer UI versus what we had on-prem).
Thankfully we haven't been impacted by this outage.
I've also heard that the cloud service is slow; you can easily check if it's your machine or the server by watching devtools -> network tab and seeing how many requests are `(waiting)`, because chances are it's Atlassian's server speed.
There’s nothing that makes me happier than the fearsome squealing noises that enterprise sales drones make when you drop the sales equivalent of a Paveway IV on their pitch.
My favourite one was running some software supply chain compliance software on itself and explaining how it was constructed on top of a CVE riddled garbage dump.
My favorite experience with a sales rep (not Atlassian related at all) was when I went to the vendor's booth at NAB (huge industry convention for those not familiar). I saw our sales rep who quickly looked down to catch her breath before greeting me. I smiled and let her know that today was her lucky day if she could just introduce me to the tech team she promised I could meet. At one point in my conversation with the tech team, I noticed that a small crowd had gathered around my conversation. I was not intending to hold public court, but I was not going to miss a chance to talk directly in person to these team members. To a non-tech person, it might have been viewed as confrontational. To a tech person to tech person, it was just direct questions being held to the fire for an actual answer vs CSR/Sales rep platitudes.
We will probably bite the sour apple (not sure if this is correct English but you’ll get the meaning even if it’s not) and switch to the data center edition which is still on prem but costs approximately twice as much.
A bit from the Boom Chicago show I saw in Amsterdam around 2004: “The Dutch expression ‘bite the sour apple’ means the same thing as ‘bite the bullet’ - Americans are obsessed with guns, and the Netherlands is full of shitty food.”
> Americans are obsessed with guns, and the Netherlands is full of shitty food.
"Bite the Bullet" is a phrase from an Englishman, Rudyard Kipling, in his first novel, "The Light That Failed". It's believed to have come from the other English idioms, "to bite the cartridge" and "chew a bullet", which date back to 1891 and at least 1796. [1]
Weird... As another commenter pointed out, the origin of 'bite the bullet' is not American at all. And 'biting the sour apple' doesn't imply an affinity for bad food (Apples are shitty? Really?). It's a metaphor about context necessitating action, not a celebration of consuming unpleasant foods.
You can probably use this 1 week (3 scheduled) outage to ask for a discount, "your cloud offering is a bucket of shit, your data center edition is too expensive, my higher-ups told me to find something else...".
You can still buy datacenter edition, and some of us are forced to do so, if we wish to continue to use Jira and Confluence. For us it's not a problem, we're heavily invested in the Atlassian suite of product, and sell consulting, so we get a significant discount. For some of our clients it's a massive problem, as Atlassian cannot promise them that data won't leave the country, if fact it's certain that it will, because there's no AWS datacenter within our borders.
Atlassian completely ignored the large number of smaller customers who are legally forced to use an on-premise solution. If the software industry was so hell-bent on SaaS there would be a great business oppotunity in creating an on-premise Jira competitor.
It is not a "contact us" pricing plan. The Data Center prices are publicly available on their website. It is more than twice as expensive as the Server offering, but still substantially cheaper than Cloud for the same number of users.
And it is the exact same software as Server with some extras enabled like support for multiple nodes, so upgrading to it is as simple as pasting in a new product key.
You never would have converted anyway though, right? Black swan events are pretty weak justifications for any decision.
In other words, this outage is not -because- it's cloud software. It's because someone, somewhere, broke something fundamental. That can (and does) happen in on prem at a much higher rate.
