AWS is the Ultimate Cloud Computing Option for Companies on the Atlassian Tech Stack

If you’re currently running the Atlassian tech stack and consider migrating to the cloud, you should take a closer look at Amazon Web Services (AWS). There’s simply no better cloud environment for Atlassian than AWS.

We’ve previously covered why so many organizations are turning to cloud computing — and, specifically, Amazon Web Services (AWS) — to improve the performance, resilience, and efficiency of their ever-increasing computing needs. While there are plenty of options available for enterprise-level cloud computing services, our DevOps experts have concluded that AWS offers the very best combination of performance, flexibility, and cost for software companies that are currently using the Atlassian tech stack.

That’s definitely a bold claim, but it’s one we’re fully standing behind, because we have worked with multiple organizations to migrate to AWS and reap the considerable strategic, financial and tactical benefits from this initiative

If your company currently relies on Jira software, Confluence, BitBucket, Crowd, or any other Atlassian applications, including agile tools, and you’re looking for the optimal performance environment to accommodate growth and support your efforts of rapidly and continuously delivering quality business applications to your stakeholders, read on. By the time you’ll finish this article, we believe you’ll agree that AWS is the way to go.

Why the cloud?

If you’re not already running your apps from the cloud, you may wonder why so many companies are keen to do so. What does cloud computing offer that makes it preferable to running your systems from an on-premises server?

In general, the benefits of cloud computing come down to three main items:

• Cost – Migrating your services to the cloud can dramatically reduce both the initial and ongoing operating costs involved in app hosting, maintenance, and management. It also reduces labor costs in your IT department, allowing for a smaller team or (more commonly) a team that’s less stressed and able to focus on more important tasks.
• Speed – The scale of infrastructure offered by large cloud computing providers provides speed and performance beyond what most organizations can supply using in-house servers and admin. Plus, if and when something goes wrong, cloud services have the resources available to repair, recover, and get you back up and running faster and more reliably than an in-house team generally can.
• Performance – Beyond just running faster, the reliability and redundancy that comes with working on a large cloud platform will enhance all but the largest and most expensive of private server setups. Because they’re operating at such a large scale, both their infrastructure and their staff expertise have been honed to such a degree, they’re able to consistently outperform in-house environments.

So, for most companies, moving to a cloud computing environment translates to getting more for less. It streamlines their internal processes, allows for quick and reliable scaling and growth, improves their customers’ experiences, and can have a marked positive effect on the bottom line.

Why AWS?

For a more in-depth look into what makes AWS so special, take a look at this blog Moving to Cloud to Maintain a Business Modern Edge with AWS.  And, for a more comprehensive approach, Overview of Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a great read. 

To quickly summarize, these are the key features/benefits that have made AWS the gold standard for enterprise cloud computing:

• Run by Amazon (one of the largest and most respected of modern tech companies) since 2006, AWS has the experience and resources to support continued improvement and excellence.
• Hundreds of thousands of businesses in over 190 countries worldwide rely on AWS and more are being added every day, creating one of the largest economies of scale in the industry.
• Access to high-level security and compliance protocols make AWS a highly-secure environment. (Of course, it’s up to each organization to monitor and ensure its own effective use of these measures as AWS doesn’t directly secure any client’s data.)
• The wide range of available tools and applications (over 90 available at this time) offers flexible and effective solutions for every imaginable computing need.

So, why is AWS the best cloud computing option for Atlassian?

Atlassian products like Jira and others are ideal for cloud computing. Jira was designed to facilitate agile development and project management.Teams that rely and use Jira’s capabilities have already reduced friction surrounding application deployment and management and are constantly seeking innovative ways to  maximize productivity and deliver increased value. Combining those skills with the benefits offered by AWS offers the very best of both worlds.

INFOGRAPHIC: How Should You Run Atlassian?

Moving Jira, Confluence, and the other Atlassian apps onto AWS greatly increases your company’s ability to scale the Atlassian tech stack quickly and easily to support temporary needs and permanent growth. As a result, you can expect:

• Faster rollouts of new features and bug fixes, helping you stay ahead of customer needs
• A dramatically increased software update cadence
• Improved reliability, uptime, and performance
• A reduced need for long periods offline
• Enhanced scalability, elasticity, and availability of the development environment
• Governance for integrating new acquisitions
• Increased development agility
• Better access and availability for employees
• Built-in standardization
• Streamlining of the entire development workflow

In short, we’re so confident you’ll benefit from migrating your Atlassian products to AWS, we’ve developed a specialized AWS migration protocol that’s already helped over 30 development companies just like yours make the switch. Review this exciting case study for an example of how the process works.

In a future article, we’ll dive further into just how easy and painless this migration can be, and how other apps beyond the Atlassian stack can succeed on AWS as well.