Cloud app operations guide

When you release an app publicly on the Atlassian Marketplace, administrators of a cloud product can install it in their site, meaning they rely on your service to deliver content to their users. Therefore, ensuring consistent operation of your app is critical. You can avoid many potential service disruptions by planning carefully. There are some important considerations to take into account:

• Our customers are all around the world, covering all timezones.
• While some instances have a handful of users, others have thousands of users depending on our products to run their business.
• We have designed our cloud-based products to be both secure and reliable, boasting 99.9% uptime and 24x7x365 support.

Below, we discuss strategies for running your cloud app as scalable, reliable software as a service. Some of these aspects need to be addressed very early in the design as implementing them after the fact can be really difficult.

Define a service level agreement (SLA)

You should define your service level targets, which you can validate during performance testing, use as a basis to monitor your apps at runtime, and guarantee by scaling your deployment. The following table lists some examples of indicators you could track:

Publish your SLA

You should publish a SLA outlining your support and service level terms online.

Manage your app performance

Scalability

There are two ways to design your apps to scale with a growing number of installations and users:

• Vertical scaling: You scale by adding more resources (e.g., CPU, memory) to existing nodes.
• Horizontal scaling: You scale by adding more nodes (e.g., servers).

It may be difficult to predict exactly the resources your apps will need. For this reason, and because your apps will operate in a cloud environment targeting thousands of customers, we encourage you to design your apps to scale horizontally.

Existing cloud providers can help you scale your implementations. For example, Heroku is a cloud application platform that can host applications developed in Java, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Scala, or Clojure. Heroku leverages Amazon AWS, and mostly supports horizontal scaling. Other examples include Google Cloud Platform and Salesforce One.

Performance testing

We recommend you run performance tests for your apps. This will help you define the resources your apps require when you first deploy them, and understand how new versions of your apps impact resource utilization. The following classes of tests are particularly useful:

You should run performance tests for your apps:

• In isolation, using mock implementations of Atlassian products REST APIs. This helps identify any issues (memory leaks, etc.) limited to your implementation.
• Using a real-life deployment environment for end-to-end performance tests. For this we recommend you use a performance testing environment that is as close as possible to the production environment. You should set up cloud instances of Atlassian products for this purpose.

There are a number of tools to help you design and run performance tests for your apps. Examples of load testing frameworks include The Grinder and Locust. They help you run distributed tests using many load injector machines.

Monitor your SLA

You should have tools to monitor your app performance at runtime, and procedures in place to scale resources once specific thresholds are met. At a minimum, you should monitor utilization of resources by your apps (CPU, memory, disk space, etc.). When using a cloud provider, you can look at strategies to automatically scale the resources allocated to your apps based on load.

Maintain your apps

Versioning and upgrading

We automatically detect updates to apps with a polling service. This way, you can easily release fixes and new features without having to manually create new version entries in the Marketplace. For more information on how to upgrade your apps and manage versions, see Upgrading and versioning cloud apps.

Deprecating or terminating service

We understand that occasionally services need to be deprecated, and they can no longer be supported. There are a number of considerations to be made when an app service is deprecated:

• Free apps: Give a two month deprecation warning to your customers. You must do this in a manner which is appropriate to your app. For example, you can place a banner within UI modules which are rendered in the page or by email the customer contact. This information can be retrieved from the app REST API (Confluence, Jira).
• Paid apps: In accordance with the Marketplace Vendor Agreement, you must maintain paid apps as long as a customer has paid for service. Reach out to the Atlassian Marketplace team for assistance. If a scope increase requires administrator approval, then you must continue support for the previous version of your app until all customers have upgraded to the newer version.

Business continuity planning

You should address the following aspects when looking at potential major outages:

• Data backups: you should have a data backup strategy that ensures your RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is met. For example, for a RPO of 24h, you should do a full backup of all app data overnight, keeping the backups on a different site to the one that is running the app.
• Recovery procedures: you should have procedures in place to restore your apps in the case of a major outage, and we suggest you do a few dry runs. Ideally, you should be testing your disaster recovery procedures regularly. Hope for the best, plan for the worst!

Note that using an world-class cloud provider minimizes the risk of a major outage impacting the users of your apps. For example when using Heroku with Heroku Postgres, the platform automatically backs up deployed applications and data, and automatically brings the application back online in case of a data center outage, with minimum data loss.

Provide support

First, check out the Atlassian support offerings. We are well known for our great support! Here is what we recommend you focus on: