High Availability Guide for Jira

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This page shows you how Jira Data Center documentation can be used in a high availability strategy for Jira. This does not cover the broader business practices, such as change management, standard operating procedures, etc.

High availability describes a family of practices aimed at delivering a specific level of "availability" by eliminating/mitigating failure modes via redundancy, and improving how the organization reacts to change. Often an organization decides on a percentage of uptime vs a year as a Service Level Agreement (SLA). For example, an SLA of 99.9% availability means that an application can be unavailable (unscheduled time) to users only 8.66 hours out of the year.


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What is the difference between high availability and disaster recovery?

 The terms "high availability", "disaster recovery" and "failover" can often be confused. For the purposes of this document,

  • "High availability" — a strategy to provide a specific level of availability, in Jira's case, access to the application and an acceptable response time. Automated correction and failover (within the same location) are usually part of high availability planning.
  • "Disaster recovery" — a strategy to resume operations in an alternate data center, if the main data center becomes unavailable (i.e. a disaster). Failover (to another location) is a fundamental part of disaster recovery. See Disaster Recovery Guide for Jira.
  • "Failover" — this is when one machine takes over from another machine, when the aforementioned machines fails. This could be within the same data center or from one data center to another. Failover is usually part of both high availability and disaster recovery planning.

Overview

Jira Data Center achieves high availability via active clustering and automatic failover within your data center.

Jira Data Center uses active clustering — this means that every node in the cluster is essentially an active Jira instance, which is able to serve requests. If a node fails, the load balancer will automatically fail sessions over to a remaining active node in the pool of nodes. Most users will not notice any downtime, as they will be automatically directed from the failed node to an active node on their next request.

To learn more, see Failover for Jira Data Center.

Database high availability in AWS

Jira Data Center also supports Amazon Aurora, which lets you apply high availability to your database. This provides an additional level of durability to your entire deployment. 

Amazon Aurora is only available through AWS. We also provide an AWS Quick Start that allows you to easily deploy and configure Jira Data Center with Amazon Aurora. For more information, see Running Jira on an AWS cluster.


Other resources

Atlassian Answers

Our community and staff are active on Atlassian Answers. Feel free to contribute your best practices, questions and comments. Here are some of the answers relevant to high availability:

Documentation

Last modified on Dec 14, 2021

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