Getting Started with Confluence Data Center
Data Center is our self-managed edition of Confluence built for enterprises. It provides the deployment flexibility and administrative control you need to manage mission-critical Confluence sites.
You can run Confluence Data Center in a cluster, or as standalone (non-clustered) installation.
This guide covers clustered Data Center deployments.
On this page:
1. Define your requirements
Before you get started, it’s a good idea to define your organization’s goals and requirements. If you need high availability, scalability, and performance under heavy load, you'll want to run Confluence Data Center in a cluster.
To prepare, we recommend assessing:
- the number of users you have
- the amount of data you have
- your expected usage patterns
- the resources your organization has allocated to maintain your Confluence site.
For more information about disaster recovery for Confluence, head to Confluence Data Center disaster recovery.
Our sizing and performance benchmarks can help you assess your expected load, and predict performance:
2. Provision your infrastructure
Once you've identified your organization's needs, you can prepare your clustered environment. Read our Clustering with Confluence Data Center for important hardware and infrastructure considerations.
To help you get started with clustering, we've provided a Confluence Data Center sample deployment and monitoring strategy.
We've also provided some general advice about node sizing and load balancers, to help you find your feet if this is your first clustered environment:
3. Plan your deployment
If you're new to Confluence, you can try out Confluence Data Center by downloading a free trial. This can help you identify dependencies and plan your path to production.
Migrating from Confluence Server to Confluence Data Center? Read through these guides to help minimize disruption during the switch:
- Moving to Confluence Data Center
- Atlassian Data Center migration plan
- Atlassian Data Center migration checklist
It's also important to take an inventory of your third-party apps (also known as add-ons) to make sure they're compatible with Data Center. Using a large number of add-ons can degrade performance, so it's a good idea to remove any add-ons that aren't crucial to functionality.
Find out how to evaluate add-ons for Data Center migration.
4. Install and configure Confluence Data Center
Once your environment is ready, it's time to install and configure Confluence Data Center in a cluster.
How you install depends on your environment:
- Your own hardware – see Installing Confluence Data Center
- Kubernetes - see Running Data Center products on a Kubernetes cluster
- Azure – see Getting started with Confluence Data Center on Azure
- AWS (Amazon Web Services) – see Running Confluence Data Center in AWS
If you're migrating from Confluence Server to Confluence Data Center, follow the instructions outlined in Upgrade from Confluence Server to Data Center.
Before deploying Confluence Data Center to production, we recommend thoroughly testing the installation. Head to our Data Center migration plan for detailed advice about testing and launching to production.
5. Maintain and scale your Confluence cluster
Once you've deployed your Confluence Data Center cluster in production, here are some resources for monitoring the health of the cluster, and scaling it up to accomodate more users:
Ready to grow? Read up on scaling and adding nodes to your new Confluence Data Center cluster: