High Availability Guide for Jira
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:
- Atlassian high availability: cold failover?
- Licensing cold failover servers
- Can a shared nas be used as the attachments path
- Load balancing Jira
Documentation
- Establishing Staging Server Environments for Jira (Jira documentation)
- Searching, Indexing, and Filters Troubleshooting (Jira knowledge base)
- Backup, High-Availability, and Disaster Recovery in Jira
- How to setup a high availability with Tomcat (external site)