Atlassian is regarded as one of Australia’s most successful tech companies. The founders, Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, financed the startup with just $10,000 on their credit card. From these humble beginnings, Atlassian grew into a global business. Today, they develop leading software products for millions of customers around the world, helping unleash the potential of every team.
Atlassian’s goal is to empower teams to work better together. To support their customers with the best-in-class tools, they sought to bring their core products to a public cloud provider. Offering a full suite of cloud-based services would provide Atlassian’s customers with greater peace of mind around security and maintenance, improved performance and user satisfaction. Over the years, many of their products, including Jira and Confluence, became cloud-based services. However, they still had a mammoth challenge on hand - to migrate one of their flagship products, Bitbucket, to the public cloud.
Bitbucket is a Git-based source code hosting and collaboration tool that enables Atlassian’s customers to build software at scale. On average, Bitbucket supports a billion transactions daily. In the past, Atlassian managed this data through their own data center, which posed challenges in terms of scale and security. Migrating Bitbucket to the public cloud would help remove these limitations.
Results
Atlassian partnered with Thoughtworks to enable the migration of over 50 million customer code repositories. Adding to the challenge, the migration needed to happen in such a way that produced zero downtime and minimal disruption for their customers. That’s like trying to change the engine of a moving car that’s driving at a 100Km per hour down a highway.
Sound impossible? Here’s how we did it.
Adopting a thin slice approach, the blended Atlassian and Thoughtworks team helped enable Bitbucket to run on Atlassian’s Platform-as-a-Service, built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Essentially, data sitting in Atlassian’s data center was being replicated onto the public cloud environment in real time. Eventually, data and requests from customers were being rerouted to Atlassian’s cloud environment, completing the migration.
Due to its unique Git-based architecture, Bitbucket's migration to Atlassian's cloud platform required enhancements to the platform itself. With limited time and little room for error, Thoughtworks was the team we trusted to partner with us to deliver a high-quality solution fast.
What would previously take years to achieve was completed in just 3 months with almost no downtime for customers. Atlassian now has the foundation to rapidly migrate the entirety of their product data into a public cloud environment. In just two months of completing the migration, Atlassian saw a 93% reduction in the volume of support requests related to outages and a 55% improvement in Bitbucket’s performance.
Migrating Bitbucket to the public cloud has delivered better security, scale and reliability for Atlassian and their customers. Long term, it will allow Atlassian’s engineers to focus on improving their applications, and ultimately, provide better customer experience. Atlassian continues to partner with Thoughtworks to solve their toughest challenges.
Coming together in a small team, Atlassians and Thoughtworkers delivered complex changes to cloud platforms, infrastructure and product codebases in record time, helping Bitbucket’s cloud migration across the finish line.
