Deploying enterprise-scale Jira on AWS: a step-by-step guide

Jira Data Center supports multi-node clustering, giving you high availability and flexible scalability. Multi-node clustering also lets you do zero-downtime upgrades for minimized planned downtime. You can leverage these features by deploying Jira Data Center on appropriate infrastructure.

Jira Data Center comes equipped with AWS Quick Start, but this deployment method is no longer supported or maintained by Atlassian, though it is still usable. Instead, we strongly recommend deploying your Data Center products on a Kubernetes cluster using our Helm charts for a more efficient and robust setup.

AWS Quick Start provided a framework for deploying your infrastructure with recommended pre-set defaults. This framework originally sped up your deployment, as you didn't have to build every piece of your infrastructure from scratch. Rather, you could design your infrastructure around our Quick Start and deploy it quickly on AWS.

This legacy document serves as a single place to access most of the knowledge resources needed to streamline deployment using AWS Quick Start. Here, we guide you through an end-to-end deployment of Jira Data Center. The instructions here should apply to both Jira Software Data Center and Jira Service Desk Data Center.

1. What you need to know

The AWS Quick Start for Jira Data Center takes the guesswork out of designing your required infrastructure, preparing all the components that need to be configured. It provides templates that you can use in this document to deploy your Jira Data Center instance.

1.1 Is this document different from the Quick Start deployment guide?

Yes. In this document, we show you a reference deployment suitable for enterprise-scale organizations. Then, we walk you through the entire deployment process (which includes using the AWS Quick Start for Jira Data Center). In doing so, we also provide recommendations based on our knowledge and experience in managing Jira Data Center at scale.

The AWS Quick Start for Jira Data Center comes with its own deployment guide. That guide shows you how to use the Quick Start to deploy Jira Data Center on AWS. However, it's designed to be useful for organizations of all sizes, and doesn't provide recommendations for a specific reference deployment.

1.2 Why use a third-party cloud platform?

When it comes to hosting Jira Data Center, using a third-party cloud platform like AWS offers many benefits compared to using physical servers. For one, it frees your organization from much of the burden of deploying, maintaining, and scaling physical hardware.

We collaborated with AWS to develop the Quick Start, focusing on making it highly configurable for most types of organizations. We formerly used this Quick Start to deploy and maintain Jira Data Center for different teams inside Atlassian before switching to kubernetes. In fact, many of the design principles used for shaping this Quick Start came from lessons we learned from our own AWS deployments.

1.3 What does enterprise-scale mean? 

This document is focused on how enterprise-scale organizations can deploy Jira Data Center and tweak it to suit their needs. We define enterprise-scale organizations as those with Large or XLarge instances (based on our Jira Data Center load profiles).

1.4 How do I know these recommendations are right for me?

Most of the recommendations in this document are based on the following:

• Benchmarks: Jira Data Center: Infrastructure recommendations for enterprise instances on AWS provides guidance on how to design architecture for the enterprise scale. This guidance is based on extensive testing, whose methodology we also explain in that same article. We use many of the same recommendations in this document. 
• Experience: Within Atlassian, we run some of the biggest Jira Data Center deployments in production. We do this because Jira is vital to the work of thousands of Atlassians. In turn, we also get to experience firsthand how to run Jira Data Center at the enterprise scale. We learn a lot in the process, and many of our recommendations are based on those learnings.

1.5 Prerequisite skills

This document will guide you on deploying Jira Data Center on AWS. It assumes you're already familiar with the application you are installing – either Jira Software or Jira Service Desk.

1.6 What this deployment will entail

We provide you with a reference architecture that we use as a base for most enterprise-scale organizations. This reference architecture contains a brief explanation of each component, so you'll have an idea of what to expect.

Then, we'll explain how to assess your own organization's size (or load profile), and choose the right settings to tweak it to your preferences. From there, we'll show you how to apply those settings on an AWS deployment using our fully supported AWS Quick Start. The Quick Start has access to more parameters you can customize, but we don't cover them in detail here.

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2. Reference architecture

The following diagram illustrates the basic architecture of what you'll be deploying through the Quick Start: 

2.1 Bastion host

This host enables secure access to Jira Data Center without exposing it to the internet. For more information, see Bastion Hosts.

2.2 Amazon Application Load Balancer

When deploying Jira on AWS, you'll need to use an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The Quick Start configures the ALB as a load balancer and SSL-terminating reverse proxy. 

2.3 Atlassian Standard Infrastructure

The AWS Quick Starts for Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket all use the Atlassian Standard Infrastructure (ASI). The ASI is a highly available, secure virtual private cloud (VPC) specifically customized to host Atlassian Data Center products on AWS. The ASI contains basic networking components required by Jira Data Center, and makes it easier to integrate multiple Atlassian Data Center products under a shared infrastructure. The following diagram shows the different components set up by the ASI:

2.4 Clustered application deployment

One of the key components of a Jira Data Center infrastructure is a clustered application deployment. Clustering provides your Jira application with better performance and high availability.

Installing Jira Data Center lays out all the clustering requirements of Jira. The AWS Quick Start for Jira Data Center simplifies the configuration of your cluster, allowing you to simply choose what nodes to use and setting up the rest as needed. 

2.5 Highly available database

The Quick Start allows you to deploy Jira Data Center with either of two supported databases: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL (default) or Amazon Aurora Features: PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition. You can configure either one with high availability using its own built-in failover features.

2.6 Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)

Jira Data Center uses a shared file system to store artifacts like attachments, avatars, icons, import/export files, and plugins in a common location accessible to all Jira nodes. The Quick Start architecture implements the shared file system by using the highly available Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) service.

2.7 Amazon CloudWatch

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3. Choosing the right settings for your deployment

The Quick Start simplifies the deployment process by choosing the right settings for most infrastructure components. The following sub-sections will guide you through configuring the settings that will help tweak it to fit your organization's size. It's best to decide now what settings to use, as this will help streamline the deployment process.

3.1 Database engine

The Quick Start allows you to choose between the following two supported databases, both of which also feature high availability:

3.2 Application and database nodes

Jira Data Center: Infrastructure recommendations for enterprise instances on AWS lays out the recommended node configurations (instance type and number) to use for the application and database. These recommendations are based on robust performance tests we ran for different Jira Data Center load profiles. 

Jira Data Center deployments of enterprise-scale organizations are typically Large or XLarge. Refer to the values in the following table to see which one is more representative of your organization:

After finding out whether you're Large or XLarge, note the type of node configuration you'll need for your infrastructure. Each node configuration offers different benefits, and in our own internal tests they all performed with an Apdex of 0.7 or above. This is the same target Apdex we use when assessing and managing the performance of our own Jira Data Center deployments within Atlassian.

3.2.1 Large

Our test results for Jira Data Center 8.5 show that having powerful hardware with fewer nodes will provide the most optimal performance. The instance type used - c4.8xlarge - has 36 CPUs and 60 GB of RAM. Having 2 or 3 nodes of this type ensures good performance at a reasonable cost. The main difference between both is fault tolerance and cost.

3.2.2 XLarge

With the difference in application node types used here, you'll need to choose carefully with XLarge. The Performance/Stability configuration offers roughly 11% better performance than the Low cost one. However, the Low cost configuration costs 57% less. 

3.3 HTTPS setup

For added security, we strongly recommend that you enable HTTPS. The Quick Start simplifies this process by just asking you for a valid certificate. You have two options for getting a certificate:

3.4 Check app compatibility

By default, the Quick Start deploys Jira Data Center 8.5 (the latest Long Term Support release version). You need to check if apps you want to install are compatible with your chosen version. 

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4. Using the AWS Quick Start for Jira Data Center

This section will guide you through an end-to-end deployment. This involves deploying a new ASI, and then deploying Jira Data Center into it. This ASI can serve as the foundational network stack for all other Atlassian Data Center products, should you also choose to deploy them (and integrate with Jira).

Step 1: Choose an AWS Region

You'll need to choose a region that supports Amazon Elastic File System (EFS). These regions are:

Step 2: Prepare your AWS account

Once you've chosen an AWS Region for your deployment, you'll need to prepare your AWS accordingly:

Step 3: Import an SSL certificate

From the AWS Certificate Manager, you can get the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of your certificate. You'll use this later on in Step 5: Customize your deployment.

Step 4: Launch the Quick Start

Log in to your AWS account and click here to launch the Quick Start. An end-to-end deployment (that is, deploying with a new ASI) should take around 40 minutes.

The fastest way to launch the Quick Start is directly from its AWS S3 bucket. However, when you do, any updates we make to the Quick Start templates will propagate directly to your deployment. These updates sometimes involve adding or removing parameters from the templates. This could introduce unexpected (and possibly breaking) changes to your deployment.

For production environments, we recommend that you copy the Quick Start templates into your own S3 bucket. Then, launch them directly from there. Doing this gives you control over when to propagate Quick Start updates to your deployment.

1. In the template you’ve chosen, the QSS3BucketName default value is set to aws-quickstart. Replace this default with the name of your S3 bucket.
   
   

2. Go into the parent directory of your local clone of the Quick Start templates. From there, upload all the files in local clone to your S3 bucket:

   aws s3 cp quickstart-atlassian-jira s3://<bucket-name> --recursive --acl public-read

3. Once you’ve uploaded everything, you’re ready to deploy your production stack from your S3 bucket. Go to Cloudformation → Create Stack. When specifying a template, paste in the Object URL of the Quick Start template you’ll be using.

Step 5: Customize your deployment

On the Specify Details page, change the stack name if needed. Review the parameters for the template and customize the deployment.

Use the Jira Product drop-down to choose what to install: 

• Jira Core (Core)
• Jira Software (Software)
• Jira Service Desk (ServiceDesk)

The first parameter to set is which product version to use (JiraVersion). 

The following table describes the other options that will allow you to implement the choices you made earlier in Choosing the right settings for your deployment:

Step 5: Configure Jira Data Center

The Quick Start deploys Jira Data Center with a single application node (Auto Scaling group of min=1 and max=1).

1. Choose the URL displayed in the Outputs tab of the AWS CloudFormation stack to go to the Jira setup screen. If you get an HTTP Error 503 response when you access the URL, it means that Jira Data Center is still loading. This is normal, and you should wait 2-3 minutes before trying again.
2. On the Setup application properties page, enter a title for your Jira application deployment and choose the Mode you want. The Base URL field should already have the domain name you used earlier in Existing DNS Name. Choose Next.
   
   
3. On the Specify your license key page, enter a valid Jira Software or Service Desk Data Center license key. If you don’t have a valid license for the Jira application you’ve selected to deploy, choose generate a Jira trial license and sign up for an evaluation Data Center license.
   
   
4. To set up the Jira application, you need to create an Administrator account and password. The Administrator account has full access to all data in Jira, so we highly recommend that you choose a strong password for this account. Enter the Administrator’s user details in the setup screen, and then choose Next.
   
   
5. On the Set up email notifications page, choose Later, and then choose Finish.
   
   
6. In the first Welcome to Jira page, choose a language and then choose Continue.
   
   
7. In the second Welcome to Jira page, choose an avatar for your profile, if you wish, and then choose Next.
   
   
8. On the Welcome page, choose Create sample project, and enter a name for the project.
9. Choose Settings (the gear icon in the upper right), and then choose System. 
   
   
10. Scroll down to the Cluster nodes section. You should see your current node in the Active state.
    
    

Your Jira deployment is now in a state where you can add nodes that will automatically cluster with your existing node.

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5. Scaling up your deployment

After fully deploying Jira Data Center, you can now scale it up. This involves increasing the number of nodes used by the application cluster. At present, it only has one node. The following steps will walk you through scaling it up to your chosen configuration in Application and database nodes.

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console, use the region selector in the navigation bar to choose the AWS Region for your deployment, and open the AWS CloudFormation console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/.
2. Click the Stack name of your deployment. This will display your deployment's Stack info. From there, click Update.
3. On the Select Template page, leave Use current template selected, and then choose Next.
4. On the Specify Details page, go to the Cluster nodes section of Parameters. From there, set your desired number of application nodes in the following parameters:
   1. Minimum number of cluster nodes
   2. Maximum number of cluster nodes
      
5.  Click through to update the stack.

After the stack update finishes, you should now have a static number of cluster nodes. Confirm that the additional nodes have formed a cluster by viewing the Cluster nodes section of the System info page in Jira.

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6. Enhancing and securing your deployment

After scaling your deployment to the right size, you can now install any apps you need to enhance Jira's functionality. This is also a good time to further secure your deployment – right before you let users start accessing it.

6.1 Installing apps

6.2 Improving security

By importing an SSL certificate and enabling SSL, you've taken the first step in securing connections to your deployment. For more information about enhancing your deployment's security, see How to configure Jira server applications for Security Best Practices.

For a more detailed list of security resources, see Server optimization. In particular, we recommend that you read and understand the following:

• Preventing security attacks
• Configuring secure administrator sessions

We also recommend that you enable Single Sign-On (SSO) via Crowd. SSO offers a great balance between security, manageability, and convenience. 

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7. Maintaining your infrastructure

7.1 Connecting to your nodes via SSH

ssh -i keyfile.pem ec2-user@<BastionPubIp>

7.2 Backing up and restoring

The Backing up data and Restoring data pages explain the backup and restoration process, along with our recommendations for each.

7.3 Migrating from an existing Jira deployment

To migrate an existing instance into AWS:

1. Migrate its database to PostgreSQL (if not already).
2. Take a backup of your existing home directory and database.
3. Copy the backup file to your file server EC2 instance.
4. Unpack the backup file under /media/atl/jira/shared of your file server.
5. Restore the PostgreSQL database dump contained in the backup file to your RDS instance with pg_restore.

7.4 Upgrading

For detailed instructions (including how to upgrade Jira Data Center with zero downtime), see Upgrading Jira Data Center on AWS. For more information about zero-downtime upgrades (outside of AWS), see Upgrading Jira Data Center with zero downtime.

7.5 Monitoring

Monitoring is crucial in maintaining the integrity and continued optimal operation of your deployment. Tracking its health helps you prepare for usage growth or re-configuration. Jira Data Center sample deployment and monitoring strategy explains how we monitor one of our own production deployments. 

If you enabled Amazon CloudWatch, you'll already have centralized logging and basic node monitoring. Centralized logging allows you to analyze your deployment's log data more easily and effectively. 

As of Jira 8.4, we also introduced a number of monitors you can use to analyze bottlenecks and set alerts for specific events. See Jira Data Center monitoring to learn more.

7.6 Re-scaling your infrastructure

Your new deployment's application node cluster uses Auto Scaling Groups, but only to statically control the number of its nodes. We don't recommend that you use Auto Scaling to dynamically scale the size of your cluster. Adding an application node to the cluster usually takes over 20 minutes, which isn't fast enough to address sudden load spikes. Rather, you should regularly monitor the performance of your deployment and manually re-scale your application node cluster as needed. 

If you can identify any periods of high and low load, you can schedule the application node cluster to scale accordingly. See Scheduled Scaling for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling for more information. 

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8. Atlassian Enterprise Support

Over time, we may change our recommendations depending on new tests, insights, or improvements in Confluence Data Center. Contact Atlassian Advisory Services for more guidance on choosing the right configuration for your Data Center deployment.

Our Premier Support team performs health checks by meticulously analyzing your deployment and logs to ensure that your infrastructure configuration is suitable for your Data Center application. If the health check process reveals any gaps or areas of improvement, Premier Support will recommend possible changes.

Remember, the AWS Quick Start template used in the preceding deployment steps is no longer supported or maintained by Atlassian. We strongly recommend deploying your Data Center products on a Kubernetes cluster using our Helm charts for a more efficient and robust infrastructure and operational setup.