Companies around the world are under constant pressure to deliver products more quickly and reliably than ever before. At the same time, customers and employees demand always-on services, which again is a big burden for DevOps teams. As organizations increase reliance on Atlassian tools like Jira and Confluence to manage their software development projects, integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) opens doors to several benefits.

At enreap, we understand the substantial benefits DevOps teams can achieve via tight integration between Atlassian and AWS products. While we are excited to host an event in Singapore in April on this integration, in this blog, let’s spend time understanding the challenges software development teams face and understand how they can boost efficiency and innovation by hosting Atlassian tools like Jira and Confluence on AWS.

Understanding Software Development Challenges

Today’s software development teams face a plethora of challenges in building, securing, and scaling cutting-edge software products. These include:

• Rapidly delivering quality products across different devices, operating systems, and form factors.
• Scaling resources to meet the fluctuating needs of customers and markets alike.
• Ensuring always-on services across each stage of the software development lifecycle.
• Centralizing alerts and requests to ensure quick resolution and minimize outages or downtime.
• Efficiently provisioning and managing resources while dealing with scalability, interoperability, and change management challenges.
• Automating CI/CD, especially for large-scale projects with extreme requirements and diverse technology stacks.

Unleashing the Power of Atlassian and AWS

Using Atlassian tools like Jira and Confluence on AWS is a great way to boost team productivity and efficiency. Atlassian offers several AWS integrations that help accelerate DevOps workflows. These integrations offer a plethora of benefits, including:

• Enhanced Team Collaboration: With software development teams using Jira and Confluence from different locations, AWS allows them to communicate and collaborate – without disruption. For instance, they can seamlessly provision, manage, and operate AWS resources natively via Jira Service Management. They can also investigate and resolve incidents and manage the IT lifecycle of resources from within their Jira interface.

• Seamless Approvals: Successful software development demands continuous collaboration between various teams and across various locations. Having tools like Jira and Confluence on AWS paves the way for seamless integrations. For instance, they can request AWS services from the Jira Service Desk without having to log in to their AWS account. Additionally, they can seek quick approvals, deliver excellent results, and keep up with rapidly changing demands. 

• High Service Availability and Scalability: Deploying Atlassian instances on Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows teams to enjoy high service availability and scale their deployment elastically. By resizing and quickly launching additional nodes, teams can easily configure, manage, and maintain their clustered infrastructure.

• Guaranteed Disaster Recovery: Organizations that use Atlassian tools like Jira or Confluence on AWS can enjoy guaranteed disaster recovery. They can ensure they can withstand the impact of negative or unplanned events. Critical tool data is stored in highly available AWS data center facilities across various regions, each with multiple, isolated, and physically separated Availability Zones. These zones are designed to be isolated from failures in the other zones and provide inexpensive, low-latency network connectivity to other zones in the same region.

• Crucial Operational Insights: Hosting Atlassian tools on AWS further allows teams to unearth insight into critical operational metrics. For instance, using Amazon DevOps Guru, they can leverage the power of machine learning to identify suspicious application behavior. Then, using Opsgenie alert and on-call management, they can have these insights routed to the right teams based on schedules, pre-defined routing rules, and escalation policies.

Deploying AWS Resources on Jira and Confluence

For teams looking to deploy AWS resources on Jira and Confluence, here are some tools to embrace:

• AWS Connectors: AWS offers several connectors for Jira and Confluence to operate AWS resources natively in these tools. For instance, using the AWS Service Management Connector, teams can get access to pre-approved, secured, and governed AWS resources, investigate and resolve incidents affecting these resources, and view, update, and resolve security findings via AWS Security Hub.

• Bitbucket Pipelines: To automate deployments to AWS, teams can choose from several preconfigured and supported Bitbucket Pipelines. They can build powerful continuous integration and continuous deployment workflows in a plug-and-play fashion. They can either use preconfigured pipes or build and share their own.

• Amazon Code Catalyst: Amazon Code Catalyst allows DevOps teams to connect their Jira Software Cloud projects and enjoy a seamless development experience. Linking projects across both products enables an end-to-end view of work across the DevOps toolchain while allowing them to see the status of pull requests which are automatically updated across both Jira and CodeCatalyst.
  

Elevate Your Business

In the complex world of software development, the integration of Atlassian and AWS helps streamline several development and deployment processes. From seamless collaboration to improved visibility into projects, automated workflows to enhanced scalability and availability, improved monitoring and analytics, to efficient resource management – elevate your business with AWS Atlassian integration today!