The Challenge:

Find an automated backup solution for Jira and Confluence services, that fits the cloud orientation of the customer and comes with a low cost profile.


Why AWS?

AWS is the leading public cloud provider and offers an advanced container hosting solution. It allows rapid development of custom applications based on future proof technology

Why Scandio?

Scandio is Atlassian Platinum Partner with 10+ years of experience in consulting, customizing and operating Atlassian products. Scandio is also partnering with AWS and offers custom developed solutions for enterprise customers on AWS.


Solution

The Atlassian cloud services offer the possibility to download a backup every 24h for Confluence, and every 48h for Jira. To automate the backup we developed a Go based tool which can trigger a new backup, monitor the backup process and store the backup on an S3 bucket.      

The Go binary has been packaged into an Docker scratch container and only contains the binary  alongside  Linux  root  CA  allowing  a  secure  connection  to  be  established  to  Atlassian‘s cloud service. Therefore the resulting docker container has only 6.8MB of size and minimal dependencies that need to be maintained. The docker container has been pushed into AWS‘s Elastic Container Registry (ECR).      

Two ECS tasks - one for Jira and one for Confluence - run on a regular basis to start the backup  process.  The  solution  is  integrated  with  CloudWatch  for  logs  and  send  alerting  messages, if any errors occur during the backup process. Furthermore the lifecycle poli-cies of S3 are utilized to move backups into Glacier after some time and delete old backups after 180 days.

Results

The development effort could be minimized by combining the provided services from AWS and by only developing the custom solution that integrates with Atlassian‘s Cloud Backup Service. It is also a very cost effective way of generating backups for Atlassian Cloud; run-ning the containers produces less than $10 cost per month, the storage costs for backups worth half a year do not exceed $100 per month.


Benefits

A very cost effective and low maintenance solution with integrated alerting system. This small example shows the real strength of cloud computing.