Hello everyone,
We have news about the Forge platform’s progress towards General Availability.
What is changing?
We will officially release Forge to GA in mid-late February, rather than the December target we previewed at Dev Day 2020. This means the GA will be more comprehensive as a point-in-time announcement, even as it does not change our roadmap. For example, we’re still planning on launching the Marketplace EAP in late February to enable Forge apps to be submitted for publication to Marketplace.
Why is it changing?
In preparing to take the Forge platform GA, we’ve had a broad set of things to do across many areas. We just couldn’t get some of those ready in time. On top of that, we’ve heard feedback that has helped us re-revaluate and raise our bar for operational readiness. We want to ship a solid experience for you on our new platform, and with both of those in mind, we believe the right thing to do is push the official release back.
Yet we know many of you are in the difficult position of trying to balance investment across several Atlassian asks, so we want to be clear that this GA is happening . We are committed to bringing Forge to market, and we think the best way to show that is in being transparent. So here is the list of the major outstanding issues that prevent us from calling the platform GA today, all of which should be resolved by mid January:
- Provide a direct distribution method so that admins can install a Forge app with a link, instead of having to set up the CLI and re-create the app from code.
- Shore up the last few sources of potential reliability concerns.
- Close out stance on pricing (still aiming for free!) and usage limits.
- Train up our customer support, developer support, and Technical Program Manager staff.
We are sharing all the above in the spirit of being open, trusting that you understand that dates can still change. However we are targeting the official GA announcement a few weeks after the above are estimated to complete; that gives us both a buffer to prevent further delays, and the opportunity have a stronger GA with fewer features remaining in beta.
From the perspective of reliability and readiness for production use, we hope you can see that Forge is already close, and will cross that line extremely soon. For example, we recently completed a comprehensive third-party professional penetration test, and while we have a few things to address the overall verdict is that Forge is a robust platform.
What do I need to do?
Let us know if you have any questions about Forge’s readiness for meaningful production use.
We hope this update helps you plan your approach to Forge in 2021 effectively, and look forward to seeing what you build! Seriously, if you have any demos, videos, or other showcases of what you’re building, our team is always keen to hear about them; it’s very motivating to see.
From all of us to all of you, we wish you the very best through the rest of 2020 and beyond, and look forward to continuing to work with you, our extended ecosystem team.
Best regards,
The Forge team