Data Center Approval Procedure for Atlassian App Vendors

Atlassian delivers a variety of applications for planning activities, managing projects and products, storing source code, and building solutions to small companies and large enterprises. Like no other companies, Atlassian team understands how unpredictable downtime or performance downgrade may cause operation instability even in the company with refined processes and procedures.

To avoid occurrence of such issues in operation with their applications, Atlassian initiated the Data Center approval program for apps distributed on the Atlassian Marketplace. This program was designed to ensure that apps for Data Center are developed with highly available, clustered environments in mind. Each app undergoes a testing and validation process run by Atlassian in cooperation with a Marketplace vendor. Apps that successfully pass this procedure are proven to perform reliably and consistently in large-scale Data Center environments.

Developing App for Atlassian Data Center Application

Marketplace vendors that want their apps to be compatible with Atlassian Data Center applications need to undergo the approval process. It includes the following:

• Filling out a Technical Readiness Checklist for the app
• Testing app impact on application endpoints
• Scale testing of the app and its impact on the Atlassian application
• Support and issue escalation details

All these items require significant input from the vendor team and preparation of the large-scale environment for testing. The vendor team needs to identify all the integration points where the app interacts with the Atlassian application and test their performance.

Technical Readiness Checklist

This is a detailed questionnaire with more than 150 questions detailing the app operation in the Data Center environment. It is comprised of the 10 major sections that cover all the crucial aspects of the app processes and its impact on the Atlassian ecosystem.

It requires specification of information about data caching and its distribution across nodes, database transactions, cluster locking for running long-term operations, event handling, scheduled tasks, resource usage, security, and other things that may impact the Atlassian application.

Testing Application Endpoints

The vendor needs to run a series of tests to verify that the app does not have great impact on the native application REST endpoints after the app installation. This is required to ensure that the app cannot cause the endpoint slowdown or failure under the high load. If your app does not interact with any application endpoints, this testing can be skipped.

Scale Testing

Every app needs to be tested in the one-, two-, and four-node environment under the high load. This load testing allows you to identify problems if your app greatly impacts performance of an Atlassian application. Testing is performed in two runs: with the app enabled and with the app disabled. Here the vendor can get great insights on the performance of the app under the load and identify points that can be accelerated.

Support Escalation Details

Here the vendor specifies how and who the Atlassian team may contact in case of an emergency case. Every vendor needs to have a dedicated contact channel to provide support for enterprise customers with Data Center deployments.

Making our apps Data Center approved

We at StiltSoft have already four apps approved for usage with Atlassian Data Center applications. Here they are:

• Awesome Graphs for Bitbucket – app to visualize and analyze performance of individual developers and evolvement of project repositories over time.
• Table Filter and Charts for Confluence – app to manage table data, filter data against multiple criteria, aggregate it in pivot tables, and visualize this data with all sorts of charts and graphs.
• Smart Attachments for Jira – app to organize retention of attachments in dedicated categories within issues, set access restrictions, and run automated operations or file validations during workflow transitions.
• Handy Macros for Confluence – a set of tools and augmentations to simplify real-time interactions with content in Confluence. It bundles the switchable status sets, image and video carousels, task reminders and inline task lists.

All these apps have passed the Data Center approval and proved to be reliable and stable solutions under heavy load.  For all these apps you can install the Data Center compatible version on the Atlassian Marketplace. In the interface of the app listing page, you can select the appropriate hosting option, as follows:

Don’t wait and try these apps in your Data Center environment.