Boosting performance and reliability for Jira Data Center with AWS Aurora
Testing Apps for Compatibility as Marketplace Vendor
Atlassian Jira Data Center 8.4+ will support AWS Aurora PostgreSQL 9.6 and as a Marketplace Vendor we need to test our Apps against all compatible databases.
Therefore this short blog post will simply show how to setup a development version of AWS Aurora and do a quick manual Jira Data Center installation against it. As well as running our Active Objects integration tests against the instance.
AWS Aurora gives us many benefits
- Multiple Read and one Write Node
- Spreadable across multiple zones
- Automatic growth in 10GB steps
- and much more
Setup AWS Aurora Dev Instance
We will start the instance for around 1–2 hours and the estimate costs from AWS docs shows around 5 USD. But I will provide the exact costs of my test instance usage at the end.
Go to AWS RDS and create basically:
- Engine: Aurora
- Edition: Postgres 9.6
- Templates: Dev/Test
- Instance Sice: db.r4.large
We will now see the created database and the Endpoints being split in Writer and Reader.
Once we click the actual Instance we get the usual RDS Connectivity details.
We can now connect via TablePlus and fire some SQL statements that create the databases and users needed for Jira and our integration tests.
Setup dockerized Jira Data Center 8.4
We are using the EAP version and when doing so you will need to Accept the according License. Threfore start an Ubuntu 18.04 server via docker and install Jira via the installer.
docker run -i -t -p 8080:8080 ubuntu:18.04
Now install Jira via the installer but select to not start it right away.
Now we create the cluster.propertiesfile in order for Jira to start up as Jira Data Center.
vim /var/atlassian/application-data/jira/cluster.properties
Start up Jira Data Center and wait a little.
/opt/atlassian/jira/bin/startup.sh
After some time open http://localhost:8080 and click trough the wizard until ‘Database setup’. Here we select Aurora PostgreSQL 9.6 and enter the credentials from our init.sql statatements.
It will take quite some time now, but it will install Jira Data Center with Aurora as database. Be sure to use a Jira Data Center License in later steps of the setup. Once finished go to the Troubleshooting admin page and check if everything is alright.
Nice. Everything is working and you can install your App and do some local testing.
Automated Active Objects Integration Tests
As we have already written in our previous blogpost we run some Integration tests against all compatible databases. So we run our tests against Aurora now.
And this also takes quite some time but all is fine and as an App Developer we are very happy to support this new database as well :)
Final Thoughts
Using AWS Aurora in production for your Jira Data Center cluster is a very good choice since failover, auto-scaling and performance are managed automatically for you. There are also a lot of migration guides by AWS on how to easily use Aurora instead of your current DB.
The costs of my 3 hour testing were 0.99 USD
Passion, friendship, honesty, curiosity. If this appeals to you, Comsysto may well be your future. Apply now to join our team!
This blogpost is published by Comsysto Reply GmbH
