Atlassian Summit 2019 recap

In February I shared TechTime was heading to Las Vegas in April. The event was action packed and our return to New Zealand was quickly followed by three public holidays over 2 weeks so I'm only now able to catch my breathe and gather my thoughts on the event to share with you.

Was it worth it?

Yes.

Can you elaborate on that?

Just like a normal day at work, while at the Atlassian Summit 2019 I wore many hats. The short answer of whether it was worth it to attend is YES for all of those roles.

Representing TechTime at Booth 302

A key reason I was at the Atlassian Summit 2019 was to talk to attendees about TechTime's apps EasySSO and UserManagement designed to help the Administrators of enterprise-sized organisations. The venue was huge and there were over 1000 vendors however the foot traffic was busy enough to keep the day moving and allowed us to connect with people that wanted to know more about the apps for themselves or to take back information to their Administrators back 'home'. We will continue to follow up with people for months.

Temporary Chief SWAG Officer

SWAG, is also known as 'stuff we all get', is a fun part of any expo experience. Styling myself as TechTime's Temporary Chief SWAG Officer, I had a lot of fun collecting stickers, t-shirts, and other swag from the many expo booths so I could share the fun with the team back in the office. I'm confidant I collected more than enough SWAG to share with the team, what do you think? A sample of what I collected is shown below:

A member of Atlassian User Group - Wellington

At the Atlassian Summit I was able to hear the new of the exciting rebrand of two major elements of our community - replacing the roles of Atlassian User Group Leaders and Atlassian Community Champions with Atlassian Community Leaders. Atlassian User Groups (AUGs) will also be renamed as Community Events to reflect you also don’t have to be an Atlassian user to attend these events and get value out of them. Feedback, questions, concerns? Comment on this article.

An Atlassian Product User (and Fan)

I underestimated how much is going on at Summit so I was only able to attend a couple of talks on Partner Day. It was great to be able to hear some announcements live (details shared below). I wanted to visit every booth on my breaks from being at booth 302 for TechTime but it was impossible to get around all the sponsor booths on the first day. In the end I barely spent any time at the Atlassian product booths.

While in Las Vegas it is easy to forget how large everything in as everything is scaled up in proportion. On a normal day my step count rarely exceeds 5000 steps but the final count for the week was in excess of 73,000 steps!

Did you find new apps to try or learn any tips and tricks?

My post-Summit to-do list includes trying out the following apps with the TechTime team:

Optimizely Rollouts offers free feature flags for development teams
Polly for JIRA Service Desk and for using Polly for sprint retrospectives look intriguing.
Spellproof (from Bunney Apps) is a proofreader that checks your spelling, grammar and style within Confluence

I'm also looking forward to being able to play in an Atlassian Cloud environment particularly their new tool/toy the Cloud Migration Assistant for Confluence. Sorry all, but I am keeping the unique login details for this test environment to myself and the team here!

The team and I are already benefiting from two timesheet tips I learnt visiting the Tempo booth at Summit:

Tempo Tip 1 - Duplicate Tempo timesheet entries (like daily standup) by holding down the Option key and dragging the entry you want to copy to the place you want to copy it to.
Tempo Tip 2 - On a Jira ticket press W to open the time logging dialog

What news can you share from Atlassian?

This section is mostly information written by Atlassian (indented).

Cloud Announcements

At Summit, we announced a number of exciting new features and tools to help our customers get the most out of their cloud deployments.

What's up with cloud?

Security

- We are rolling out encryption at rest and it’s available today, but only for NEW customers, or existing customers creating NEW cloud sites.
- A revamped Atlassian Trust Center has been created to ensure more up-to-date information on our major security, privacy, compliance, reliability initiatives and more.
- Cloud Platform and Services Roadmap to help your organization plan and grow with Atlassian
- Continuously improving and expanding Atlassian Access for customers that need greater organizational visibility and control for their Atlassian cloud products.

Cloud scale and reliability

- 10K users! Last year we announced that our cloud platform scaled to 5,000 users, we are now offering up to 10,000 users for a limited number of customers in our EAP.
- Doubled (2x) the number of AWS regions we support around the world reducing latency and improving performance. Now available in the United States, Germany, Ireland, Singapore and Australia.

Cloud Migration

- Launched the Atlassian Migration Center along with migration assistants for Jira Software Cloud and Confluence Cloud.
- Created Cloud Migration and Trust & Security groups on the Atlassian Community.

Data Center Announcements From Summit

As a reminder and re-cap, we had a lot of great announcements about Data Center come out during Summit. We truly are laying down the foundation for the future of Data Center with CDN to Rate Limiting and more. Make sure to find out all the amazing news.

Foundation for the future

- Introducing Support for Amazon Aurora: We will be enhancing one of the core promises of Data Center, high availability, by introducing support for Amazon Aurora (coming soon).
  - Products: All Data Center Products
- CDN Support: To help improve performance for distributed teams, we are introducing CDN support... For those who use AWS, CloudFront CDN will be a single-line configuration in our updated templates. Plus, you'll be able to use any other CDN you want. By enabling CDN support, you can accelerate the experience of your remote users' as they interact with the UI of our products, and reduce peak load on your primary application instances.
  - Products: Jira, Jira Service Desk, Confluence, Bitbucket
- Smart Mirror Farms for Bitbucket:Smart Mirror Farms will meet the increasing number of builds and clones, increasing merge and deployment frequency, and adoption of additional developer tools like resource intensive CI/CD across our enterprise customer’s development teams.
  - Products: Bitbucket
- Rate limiting: Customers can experience performance degradation or outages due to a misbehaving app, automated CI that caused a build storm, and many other automations. To help customers better protect their instances, we are allowing customers to set thresholds for the number of requests allowed in a specific time frame. This solution is going to target REST API usage specifically. We realize this isn’t the only place where you see abuse coming from, so we will be continuing to invest in helping you self-protect your instances and we are looking to add similar support in Jira Software and Jira Service Desk in the future.
  - Products: Bitbucket (Jira & JSD coming next)
- Issue Archiving: Archiving whole projects can be too broad, especially when you have really large or long-lived projects. And for our JSD customers, project archiving doesn’t always make sense because it basically means archiving an entire service desk. This is why we are expanding on Project Archiving that we introduced last year and will be adding Issue Archiving.
  - Products: Jira & JSD
- Prescriptive Guidance: You may have noticed that we’ve started publishing more prescriptive guidance over the past year like node sizing, performance testing frameworks and much more. Soon, we’ll also be adding hardware and environment configurations to the list. Choosing the right infrastructure set up for a Data Center deployment is not a trivial task, no matter the size of your organization. To help you with this process, we’re creating several reference guides based on of hundreds of performance tests across a variety of instance types. All of these tests were run on AWS compute-optimized Virtual Machines. They will help you determine the most cost effective and efficient choice for your organization by showing how different setups impact different factors like performance and cost.
  Stay tuned for similar tests for Bitbucket Data Center and other customer profiles in the future
  - Products: Hardware configurations available for JSW, Confluence, Bitbucket. Environmental configuration not yet scoped
- AWS + Azure Updates: We’ve updated every single one of our AWS and Azure templates which means improved support and they are simpler to set up and customize for your specific needs.
  - Products: Jira, Jira Service Desk, Confluence, Bitbucket
- Centralized License and permissions visibility for Crowd:We extended Crowd beyond user management and helping to surface more cross-product visibility in Crowd. We’re starting with centralized permissions visibility, which will allow admins to see who has access to what across all of their instances. This will be followed by centralized license visibility will make it easier to track the myriad of licenses that spring up all over their org.
  - Products: Crowd

Enterprise Releases

Responding to feedback from customers and solution partners, Atlassian will announce planned Enterprise Releases in advance so project planning can get underway. New enterprise release versions will now be released with that designation rather than applying it retrospectively as they have done to date. Enterprise releases only apply to Confluence, Jira Software and Jira Service Desk. The enterprise recommendation for Bitbucket is n-1 based on the minor version (i.e. the latest release is Bitbucket Server 6.2 and the enterprise recommended version is Bitbucket Server 6.1).

Confluence 6.13, Jira Software 7.13, and Jira Service Desk 3.16 are the enterprise releases at the time of writing. Jira Software 8.5 & Jira Service Desk 4.5 are targeting Q3 2019.

Jira Align

Agile Craft, which provides an executive-level reporting view on what your Agile and software development teams are doing, was acquired by Atlassian in March 2019. Agile Craft has been rebranded as Jira Align and is now part of our Agile at Scale solutions.

Where can I find out more about Atlassian Summits and what it is like to attend this event?

The Atlassian online community has a dedicated space to ask questions and talk about past, current and future Summits. You will see a lot about the Atlassian Summit held in Las Vegas in April 2019 right now and over the next few months talk will turn to the 2020 Atlassian Summit to be held at the same venue in the first week of April.

Some attendees shared their thoughts recently when asked to write about our Summit experiences.

Atlassian also understands it is not possible for everyone to travel to Atlassian events so they created an online portal. Read about Jody's (Virtual) Summit Experience and think about whether this could be a good option for you next year if a work trip to Las Vegas is not on the (credit) cards for you.

Rachel Wright (author of the JIRA Strategy Admin Workbook) has written about Summit through the years:

She has also written a helpful article How to Get your Boss to Send you to the Atlassian Summit User Conference.