Plan your move: Support for Bitbucket Server ends on Feb 15, 2024

In 2020, Atlassian announced that support for our server products, including Bitbucket Server, would end on Feb. 15, 2024. Since the announcement, we've invested in several scalability and performance features in both Bitbucket Cloud and Bitbucket Data Center so your engineering teams can choose to use Bitbucket either in the cloud or on-premises.

If you're a Bitbucket Server customer in the process of deciding next steps for your organization before support ends on Feb 15, 2024, it's time to start planning your move.

Don't stay on Bitbucket Server unsupported. Without regular security updates and maintenance, your code can potentially be exposed to threats and vulnerabilities. This can result in interruptions to your developers and a poor customer experience. We recommend using our free migration tool to move to Cloud or following this process to upgrade to Data Center as soon as possible.

Should I move to Bitbucket Cloud or Bitbucket Data Center?

Every engineering organization has different needs around code management, and so Atlassian offers two options to migrate your Bitbucket Server instances.

Bitbucket Data Center

We recommend upgrading to Bitbucket Data Center if you fit into the following three scenarios.

  1. Your organization has a requirement to stay on-premises.
  2. You are in a regulated industry that requires FedRamp or HIPAA certifications or in a geo that requires you to store your data in a specific country or region. With Data Center products, you control where your data is stored and manage any compliance requirements within your team.
  3. Enterprise teams with over 10,000 users.

Learn how you can upgrade to Bitbucket Data Center.

Bitbucket Cloud

For all other engineering teams that need a scalable and secure code and CI/CD tool that tightly integrates with the Atlassian stack, Bitbucket Cloud is the recommended option.

5 major benefits of migrating to Bitbucket Cloud

1. Reliable & secure Atlassian Cloud platform

Bitbucket Cloud is on the same platform as Jira and Confluence. We have a dedicated security team that manages all maintenance and security updates so you don't have to. No more upgrades, maintenance, or managing outages and downtime. We have 99.9% SLAs, full encryption at rest and in transit, regular backups, and our Bitbucket status page lets you and your teams monitor any outages or maintenance periods.

2. Increase deployment velocity

Bitbucket Pipelines is a developer-friendly CI/CD tool that is integrated out of the box with Bitbucket Cloud. It's quick to set up, easier to use than on-prem tools, and fully hosted by Atlassian. Unlike an on-prem CI/CD tool like Bamboo or Jenkins, you don't need specialized teams managing these tools, or invest in more hardware as you scale.

  • Developers can get started quickly with pipeline templates and easily configure them.
  • Developers can view test reports as soon as they run and fix issues before deploying. This means faster deployment cycles, and error-free deployments.
  • For consistency and compliance, platform teams can empower developers by providing approved pipelines to import into their workflow.

We don't lock you in. If you choose to continue using your on-prem CI/CD tool, Bitbucket Cloud connects to all major tools.

3. Improve developer productivity

Since Bitbucket is on the same cloud platform as Jira and other Atlassian tools, code is seamlessly integrated throughout the DevOps lifecycle, from planning to incident management. This means faster feedback loops across teams and more automation so developers can focus on code.

Reduce context switching

Bitbucket Cloud has 2-way Jira Software integration. Developers see a Jira issues tab in their repo screen so they can manage issues within Bitbucket while software teams can monitor code statuses and deployments within Jira.

Decrease the risk of shipping breaking code changes

When you connect Bitbucket Pipelines to Jira Service Management, operations teams can approve code changes before the code gets deployed to production. This is an automated workflow so developers don't need to manually manage the process. And with commits being passed to Jira Service Management, incident teams can quickly track down code owners when there is an incident, driving down time to resolution.

Secure & compliant AI

For AI-based code suggestions, we recommend integrating with one of our AI partners, Tabnine or Codeium. They use models trained on permissive open-source code, can connect to your Bitbucket repos for better in-context suggestions, and have a zero-day retention policy i.e. they don't retain any record of your code, and the code suggestions they provide are licensed for use. This means your developers can use AI while keeping your code compliant.

Both Tabnine and Codeium also have a self-managed option.

Screenshot from Codeium

And with Atlassian Intelligence integrated across all our cloud tools, including Bitbucket, developers have access to AI functionality such as finding Jira issues using natural language search, writing documentation in Confluence, or summarizing PR descriptions in Bitbucket. All of the work we do is guided by our responsible technology principles, which focus on transparency and trust.

Atlassian Intelligence (available in beta)

4. Manage enterprise-wide code and CI/CD in one tool

If you're managing multiple server instances across teams and separate CI/CD tooling, it means multiple manual upgrades, user management, and maintenance.

With Bitbucket Cloud's Workspace > Project > Repo > Pipeline architecture, admins can manage code and CI/CD across multiple business units, projects, and code repositories in one UI, while engineering teams can use our granular permission controls to allow the right level of access to each user.

Unified user management: In Feb 2024, new customers will be able to manage Bitbucket Cloud users in Atlassian Access and connect to third-party directories e.g. Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace. This means admins have visibility into users across Atlassian tools in one UI and developers get access to all the tools they need, faster.

5. Scalable and flexible Atlassian pricing model

Compared to Data Center:

Cloud pricing is at the user level, not by tier, e.g. if you have 800 users, you don't need to pay for a 1000-user tier as you do with Data Center. Pay for what you need today and scale when you need to.

Compared to competitors:

  • Competitors offer bundled plans that include planning tools, and wikis along with code tools, without the flexibility to pick and choose seats per tool. At Atlassian, we price each of our tools separately so you can customize the seat mix you need, e.g. 1000 seats on Jira and Confluence, 600 on Bitbucket, 250 on Jira Service Management. Pay for what you need.
  • In Bitbucket Pipelines, we give you base build minutes and allow you to add more.
  • With Atlassian Access, you get Bitbucket SSO, audit logs, and user management for no additional cost beyond what you're already paying for Access.

Bitbucket Cloud Premium is priced at $6/user/mo while Gitlab prices between $29-$99/user/mo and GitHub's enterprise plan is $21/user/mo.

How to migrate to Bitbucket Cloud

  1. Plan your migration: This page gives you step-by-step guidance on the migration process. Plan your migration and request for your 60-day evaluation extension.
  2. Use the free migration tool: Bitbucket Cloud Migration Assistant is our free & supported migration tool to move your code, users, PRs, and comments to Cloud. For CI/CD, we recommend starting new pipelines on Bitbucket Pipelines and migrating from your on-prem tool gradually. Download the app or find it installed in your administration tab in Bitbucket Server or Data Center, starting in version 8.14.
  3. Set user permissions and configure your instance: Once your code is migrated to Bitbucket Cloud, view this page for all the things you need to do to get your cloud instance ready for use. Set up your account

Questions, need a demo? Get in touch with sales or support

If you need an answer to a migration-related question or need a custom demo, please contact our sales team or open a support ticket. If you need a partner to help you with your migration, please get in touch with an Atlassian-certified solution partner.