[dangus]

As a former Atlassian administrator, I believe the opposite. Maintaining the system on-premise was a bigger risk.

The products are too complicated to be packaged nearly with a bow for sysadmins. You inevitably start having to become at Atlassian SME just to keep that shit running.

I’m all for your company going with an alternative product, but for a company who would rather stick with Atlassian products, you’d be insane to prefer the on-premise version.

Either insane or you’re a giant company with heavy compliance requirements and you don’t mind hiring a dedicated person/team to operate the data center product and babysit other on-premise vendors’ services.

In my experience, I was running an on-premise Jira installation for a <100-person company, which was an insane waste of my time compared to the other tasks I could have been doing to help build our core product.

[dzikimarian]

Completely opposite here. We ran jira for many years on-prem, it was mostly effortless - maybe a few man/days per year? (user accounts in low 3 digits, but we kept workflows simple and ran light on plugins).

I'm curious what were actually tasks that wasted your time?

[Aeolun]

How is the product so terrible that running a 100 person instance is a pain in the ass?

[smileybarry]

Classic JIRA is very flexible into shaping a workflow, but it's sort of a very long pipeline of: schemas, fields, workflows, project templates, etc. I loved that flexibility and being able to drill down into a bug report, but it definitely took time to set up, and occasionally unravel & put back together when you needed to fix something small.

There's also the usual stuff of finding & setting up plugins, and then looking for a maintenance window that people can agree on, while side-stepping those settings you forgot needed a restart to apply (thus bringing your live maintenance to a halt because you can't bring it offline now).

[belthesar]

Running core versions of the products aren't terrible - usually the complexity comes with the slough of plugins that folks install to customize the platform, all needing to stay up-to-date.