Cloud vs. Server for JIRA and Confluence

Pros, cons and costs to help facilitate our decision about running these tools in the Cloud versus Server.

Pros and Cons

"Server" means running on Amazon AWS hosting where the OpenLMIS team is responsible for the server security, backups, updates, management, etc.
*Atlassian has accepted this new feature request, but schedule is unknown: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-6999  

Cost & Effort Comparison

Include licenses/subscriptions as well as estimated labor/time costs.

On-going maintenance for the Server edition

• upgrading JIRA and Confluence (a few times each year; usually it is low effort unless something breaks, then requires expertise to repair)
• arranging and managing backups
• upgrade Amazon AWS server OS (roughly monthly; requires some Linux sysadmin skills; usually low effort unless something breaks)
• rebuild the server or re-install JIRA and Confluence (only needed every 3-5 years)

Plugin Costs

Atlasssian Policy (Server Plugins are Free)

Atlassian's policy for all plugins is that their Server-editions are free to use for open-source projects. No such generosity, however, is afforded to Cloud versions of the plugins. If we opt for Cloud editions, we will have to pay for many of the plugins we want to use.

Cloud Plugin Pricing

Our cost for plugins should we opt for cloud hosting depends on the following variables:

1) Which plugins we want.

2) The maximum number of users for which we'd like our Atlassian products to be licensed. 

To account for these variables, the following set of potential costs was given above in the "Cost & Effort Comparison" table: $13,000/year ($1138/month), and $32,000/year ($2659/month). The rest of this section details how these values were determined.

The cost for plugins in the cloud varies according to the number of users one’s Atlassian product is licensed to allow. While we currently have 157 active (as opposed to disabled) users, our cloud license allows for up to 500. Cloud plugin pricing is based on that 500-user license.

The available pricing tiers based on the maximum number of users a system allows are as follows: 10 users, 15 users, 25, 50, 100, 500, and 2000. Although it’s conceivable that we can cull our current set of 157 users down to below 100, curating the list would require both upfront and continued effort. There exists no standard price delta from one user-tier to another amongst plugins. If we could reduce users to fewer than 100, the total plugin cost would be ~$6,000/year ($513/month). But we didn't include that annual cost in the table summary above because we aren't sure it is feasible. Nonetheless, costs for both the 100 and 500 user-tiers are thus respectively included below.

The Plugins listed below are ones in which we’ve shown interest. They comprise the "broader set of plugins" referred to within the "Cost & Effort Comparison" table. The subset of underlined plugins constitute the "select few plugins" referenced in the aforementioned table. 

JIRA:

eazyBI Reports and Charts for JIRA Cloud: $150 or $200 / month
Agile Story Plugin for JIRA: $213 or $438 / month (these represent average costs of the two related plugins under consideration)
Gantt Cloud: $42 or $56 / month
Gliffy Diagrams for JIRA: $150 or $500 / month
JIRA Misc Workflow Extensions: $50 or $95 / month
Zephyr: $200 or $350 / month

Confluence:

Gliffy Diagrams: $150 or $500 / month
Advanced Tables: $10 or $20 / month
Questions for Confluence: $150 or $250 / month
Team Calendars: $150 or $250 / month