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by marcuslager 3253 days ago
"teams in large organizations"

Could be simplified to just "teams.

These days from what I can see teams in organizations with no ability to devise a sane architecture usually take the microservice route. Management loves this new buzzword. To them it means problems go away.
1 comments
tajen 3253 days ago
Atlassian started rearchitecturing around services in 2013. They were 1500ppl at the time. Confluence and JIRA were not only monoliths, but non-multitenant, so they had to have one instance per customer (700Mb RAM JIRA, 700Mb Confluence, a dozen gigs on SSD). The worst was restarting upon upgrades: Easily 3-5 minutes per instance, which, at scale, was a huge burden.

After rearchitecting around services, pieces could be restarted and upgraded independently. As a customer, we didn't notice differences in the UI (e.g. the file storage on AWS).

Epilogue: They had a shared login system, multi tenant and all... which they recently replaced by a third party. Proof that services are replaceable, but also an acknowledgment that simple critical services can be hard at scale.

I personally believe that Atlassian switched to services at the right time, when it's hard to coordinate teams of thousands working on a dozen products, and when the monolithic approach was way past refactoring date ;)

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tokenizerrr 3253 days ago
On the flip side, cloud hosted jira is soooo slow now.
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tajen 3246 days ago
A bit late to answer, but by their EULA you are not allowed to talk about the performance of their products.

Yes, they did that!

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eternalban 3247 days ago
Rather a late reply but Service Oriented Architecture is in fact an architectural approach. "Micro" services deem even the burdern of devising a coherent "service" as too great a burden to tackle.
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ris 3253 days ago
> Confluence and JIRA were not only monoliths, but non-multitenant, so they had to have one instance per customer (700Mb RAM JIRA, 700Mb Confluence, a dozen gigs on SSD).

I don't understand how you engineer even a monolith like that in the first place.

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kod 3253 days ago
And Jira still can't handle email in a sane fashion...

I wouldn't look to Atlassian for anything regarding engineering practices.

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