The clock is ticking: Atlassian’s support for Bitbucket Server ends on February 15, 2024

Way back in October 2020, Atlassian announced that they would be ending support for their Server products—including Bitbucket Server—on February 15, 2024. The clock has been ticking away, and now it’s just three months until deprecation day.

If you’re using Bitbucket Server for your source code management, what does this mean for you? In this post, you’ll learn about the impact of this change, your options, and how you can move to GitHub.

What happens when support for Bitbucket Server ends?

According to the Atlassian website, from February 15, 2024, Bitbucket Server customers will no longer get:

• Technical support
• Security updates
• Bug fixes for vulnerabilities

This is a big deal for current customers who are currently invested in Bitbucket Server, have thousands of lines of code in the system, and use it for their software development lifecycle.

What are the options for current Bitbucket Server customers?

Bitbucket Server customers have four options going forward:

1. Stay on Bitbucket Server, while accepting zero support and mounting security risks
2. Change your license to Bitbucket Data Center and take on increased costs
3. Switch to Bitbucket Cloud and deal with significant feature gaps
4. Take the opportunity to switch to another developer platform, like GitHub

Stay on Bitbucket Server, while accepting zero support and mounting security risks

If you’re using Bitbucket Server, your instance won’t simply stop working on February 15, 2024.

You can continue to use it against Atlassian’s advice, but you’ll lose out on security updates, which according to Atlassian “help protect your business from threats and vulnerabilities.” If you need support, you’ll be on your own.

Change your license to Bitbucket Data Center and take on increased costs

Bitbucket Data Center is Atlassian’s alternative self-hosted, self-managed code hosting tool. Moving from Bitbucket Server to Bitbucket Data Center is a simple process, which you can complete in your instance’s UI.

Bitbucket Data Center offers improved performance and reliability, but it comes with a significant increase in annual cost compared to Bitbucket Server.

With Bitbucket Server, an organization buying seats for 50 developers would pay $3,000 in the first year, and $1,500 per year in subsequent years based on 2021 pricing, immediately before Atlassian stopped selling Server licenses.

Buying Bitbucket Data Center licenses for 50 developers will cost $4,200 per year, every year. That’s an extra $1,200 in the first year, and an extra $2,700 every year from the second year onwards.

The same logic applies to larger organizations, too. Buying 500 seats, with the old Server pricing model, you’d pay $14,550 in the first year and $7,275 in subsequent years. With today’s Data Center pricing, it’s $20,200 every year.

Switch to Bitbucket Cloud and deal with significant feature gaps

Atlassian’s cloud offering, Bitbucket Cloud, is their recommended migration path and Atlassian offers tools to help with the migration from Server to Cloud. But this won’t be right for everyone.

Here are some reasons why Bitbucket Cloud might not be a good fit:

• Bitbucket Cloud data is hosted in the USA, with no data residency control for customers. This can be problematic depending on where your organization and customers are based, and the industry you’re in.
• Bitbucket Cloud also doesn’t meet security standards that are required for heavily regulated industries, like FedRAMP.
• Securing your code and development process with SAML single-sign-on (SSO) is a premium feature on Bitbucket Cloud, requiring Atlassian Access at an extra cost.
• Atlassian’s tools are standalone, rather than a single integrated platform. This can mean a disjointed experience for developers, with more time context-switching and less time creating and shipping code.

Why should I move to GitHub?

GitHub’s unified, integrated, enterprise-ready platform meets the needs of developers and organizations alike with a complete solution.

Unlike GitHub’s single appliance deployment model, Atlassian products are all independently released, procured, installed, updated, integrated, and managed, forcing IT teams to repeatedly spend days, rather than minutes, updating team subscriptions to ensure that developers can effectively use their capabilities.

GitHub Enterprise Cloud provides a number of flexible configuration options, allowing each business to configure the platform to best meet their unique needs. GHEC is not limited to only being compliant with US laws. It is compliant with numerous country laws, making it suitable for hosting and development wherever you are.

As a SaaS platform, GitHub Enterprise Cloud is the most operationally efficient deployment option for organizations operating at scale on GitHub. In addition to its ability to scale to support companies with more than 50,000 developers, the platform provides resilience and disaster recovery out of the box. Combining GitHub Enterprise Cloud with GitHub Actions and other natively embedded features, the GitHub platform is the platform of choice for many leaders.

I’m ready—how do I migrate to GitHub?

If you’re looking to move from Bitbucket Server to GitHub, you’ll have data and workflows that you’ll want to bring with you, including:

• Your code and collaboration history, for example pull requests, comments, and reviews
• Your CI/CD workflows
• Integrations

Migrating your code and collaboration history

If you’re happy to just migrate your code and commit history and lose your historic PRs, migration is as simple as a clone and a push.

If you want to bring your pull requests, comments, and reviews with you, GitHub has GitHub Enterprise Importer, which is a free, self-serve, and easy-to-use tool to migrate your repositories and pull requests from Bitbucket Server to GitHub Enterprise Cloud.

If you’re looking to adopt GitHub Enterprise Server, you’ll need to get in touch with our Expert Services team, which offers specialist tools for this kind of migration.

Migrating your CI/CD workflows

Depending on the CI/CD tool that you’re using with Bitbucket Server, you may be able to stick with what you’re already using, or you may need to migrate to a new tool.

If you’re using Atlassian’s Bamboo Server for your continuous integration, this won’t work with GitHub, so you’ll need to switch. GitHub Actions, which is GitHub’s own integrated CI/CD system, is a great option, and GitHub Actions Importer can help you to rewrite your existing workflows to work with Actions.

If you’re using another CI/CD tool, you can probably stick with it. CircleCI, Travis CI, and Jenkins are all compatible with GitHub. Of course, you might still want to switch to GitHub Actions, and GitHub Actions Importer can help there too, with its ability to translate CircleCI, Jenkins, and Travis CI configuration into GitHub Actions workflows.

Dealing with integrations

Most teams use many integrations as part of their day-to-day software development workflow. These might be integrations built by other companies, or custom integrations built by your team using publicly available APIs.

If you’re using public integrations — for example with a project management tool — the chances are that a similar integration is available in the GitHub Marketplace. As an example, many Bitbucket Server customers use Bitbucket with Atlassian’s Jira project management tool, and Atlassian offers a very similar integration with GitHub.

If your team has built custom API integrations, you’ll need to audit these, figure out if you need them, and if so, tweak to work with the powerful GitHub API.