Seeking Atlassian feedback on the need to pay $42k to develop DC plugins

Marketplace General Discussion
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Hey Atlassian - I find myself in a strange, somewhat Twilight Zone-eseque situation with regards to developing plugins for Data Center.

Here goes:

Jira Server is going away, and everyone is forced to DC and Cloud.
If I’m a developer with a DC plugin in the marketplace, I might want to ‘dogfood’ an actual, real, DC stack somewhere.
By that, I mean, setup a long-living production stack with some real data and my plugin, etc, and not a timebomb license, or abusing the eval system endlessy.

It seems that this is a scenario Atlassian didn’t ponder properly, or intentionally ignored, yet many vendors might find themselves in.

As a Silver partner Atlassian gives me $25k of monopoly money. But, that doesn’t even get close to buying a DC license, as those start around $42k.

If I ask Atlassian support for a free license, I’m told in no uncertain terms that that won’t happen, and I could simply apply my monopoly money towards those $42k.

If I’m big enough to have a TPM, maybe I get lucky, and they can champion this for me and get me a free license. (I know through the grapevine, that this is met with mixed results).

I can’t imagine that Atlassian expects us to cough up $42k each year, simply to keep testing our apps in a realistic environment.

Can someone please shed some light on this, and what we developers are supposed to do here?

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I’ll put $10 on the answer being “Just use an evaluation license”. Anyone fancy a bet?

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If only there were a Discourse plugin for betting…

Just to confirm, the timebomb license isn’t working because of some culmination of it doesn’t last long enough and you have to reset everything every time you wanna do testing

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I second @ademoss thoughts here. We need a consistent way to develop, test, and use Jira Data Center. We switched to using DC about 18 months ago and “dogfooding” DC has been helpful.

I hope Atlassian can formulate an approach that offers developers a way to use the same product our customers are using. Timebomb and evaluation licenses (and similar approaches) just add friction.

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So, my issue with time bomb licenses is…

  1. expiry after 3 hours. Sometimes I just need longer to get my things done. Days longer, not a few hrs longer.

  2. Regenerating a test instance can be tedious, and time consuming when using large data. Reindexing alone can take a significant amount of time once you get into 100k+ tickets. Often times, that’s just a waste of time.

  3. As @Adam mentioned, the intend is dogfooding long term. Timebomb licenses are good for testing something quickly, then tearing down the instance and moving on. That doesn’t really give me an idea on sustained use. It doesn’t give me an idea of how to improve my product, if I am not using it in a realistic scenario (hence the “dogfooding” term").

Others might be able to articulate additional issues as well.

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Oh I definitely second this. Our main app is about synchronisation and runs background tasks. We’ve had our fair share of memory leaks, caching issues and database performance problems that can only be identified in large scale systems running over longer periods of time.

We’ve been lucky to have had very patient customers with 15, 30 and 50K DC instances that helped us debug our app in these scenario’s after the app brought down several production nodes, in some cases even causing complete production downtime. These are top tier Fortune500 companies.

These are also scenario’s that are not covered in the DC approval process. Being able to have a consistent setup running and see long-term effects of our apps performance would be very beneficial to us.

In the past, I’ve been able to get long-term 10K DC licenses for DC approval, but the DC approval team has now switched to the same just use evaluation licenses dogma so this is no longer a workaround for getting a test license.

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I have yet to try this myself, but my understanding is that we can meanwhile get $10 Developer licenses for server and Data Center (a few fellow partners have succeeded to get those as per the preceding announcement thread How to obtain server starter licenses after February 2, 2021)!?

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AFAIR a 50 User JSM DC License is the cheapest way to purchase a DC license.
But of course thats no option if you need Jira Software features.
I wonder what happens if you add a 10 / 25 User JSW License to a JSM DC installation