Confluence Data Center:
optimized for scale
Strike a balance between growth and control of your Confluence instance.
Confluence connects teams within your organization, empowering teams to innovate at scale. If you’re experiencing rapid and unanticipated user growth, work stopping when Confluence is down, or are in need of a disaster recovery plan, it may be time to upgrade Confluence Data Center.
In this guide, we’ll run through everything you need to know about making the switch.
01
Data Center: optimized for scale
Built for administrators who prepare for the future
Confluence Data Center is a self-managed enterprise edition that gives you the reliability and compliance your organization demands, with the infrastructure to manage team growth without compromise.
Beyond the features previously offered in our Server product, our Data Center products offer a number of features and added benefits, such as:
Scale and performance
Data Center products are built to scale as you grow. Use your current infrastructure, or use a clustered environment and add nodes without downtime or hits to performance.
Security, compliance and governance
Get the comprehensive security, compliance and controls you need without slowing your teams down.
Infrastructure and automation
Deploy on-premise or with IaaS vendors like AWS and Azure to best suit your company’s existing investments.
Reliability and stability
Keep business running smoothly with rate-limiting, clustering and a disaster recovery strategy.
Apps and extensibility
Data Center approved apps are purpose-built and verified for response times, scale and supported databases.
Additional support
Free access to Atlassian Priority Support for the first 180 days of your license - which includes higher SLAs, faster triage and resolutions.
Innovate at scale
Empower teams and drive success with the horizontal scalability required for seamless collaboration.
Grow fast, grow smart
Scale with confidence and build a long-term strategy for scaling teams, applications, and infrastructure.
Tools you can trust
In the face of tough compliance, usage, and geographic constraints, your business can depend on our tooling and practices.
Balance autonomy and control
As growth accelerates, Data Center balances team autonomy with the right controls, and governance.
The Confluence Data Center guide for success
Download this guide as a PDF, so you can reference it offline!
Before you install Confluence Data Center, be sure to take time to understand the technical requirements and necessary investments. This will impact how you set up your instance.
02
Your Confluence Data Center deployment
Understanding the difference between Confluence Server & Data Center
There are two products that allow you to run Confluence in your own environment: Confluence Server and Confluence Data Center. If you're already familiar with Confluence, you may already be using Confluence Server.
We want all teams to get the most out of Confluence, so the core features are available for everyone on Confluence Server and Confluence Data Center.
Some features are available specifically for customers with a Data Center license. These may be specific to the needs of larger enterprises, or may provide additional infrastructure or administrative options to help you strike a balance between growth and control of your Confluence instance. These features include:
- Read-only mode to help minimize planned downtime
- CDN support to improve geo-performance
- Rate limiting to improve instance stability and self-protection, and
- Advanced permissions management features for easier administration
You can now access Data Center features on your current infrastructure by simply applying a Data Center license. Or, if your organization needs the benefits of a clustered architecture, you can set up clusters before migrating to Data Center.
* For a full feature comparison between Server and Data Center, see our documentation site.
If you choose to run Confluence Data Center in a cluster, each cluster includes:
- Multiple server nodes for Confluence
- Multiple server nodes to run Synchrony, the engine that powers collaborative editing
- A shared file system
03
Getting started
Whether you're upgrading from Confluence Server or spinning up a new instance of Confluence Data Center, setting up a new install of Confluence is no easy task. As an administrator, you'll need to set aside time to understand the requirements, make a plan of attack, and execute on it. You might also encounter roadblocks, such as bureaucratic or budgetary constraints within your organization.
We're confident that the benefits of upgrading to Confluence Data Center—including high availability, read-only mode, advanced permissions management, infrastructure choice and scalability—will make this investment of time and effort worth it for you, your team and your organization's users.
In the next section, you'll find helpful tips and links to technical documentation you'll need to be successful.
If you've already set up your Confluence Data Center instance, feel free to skip ahead.
04
Read me
Performance recommendations and requirements
You can run the Confluence Data Center application on a single server, just like a Server installation. This allows you to take advantage of Data Center-only features without adding to your infrastructure.
Or, you can run Confluence Data Center in a cluster with multiple application nodes, and a load balancer to direct traffic. If you don't already have a load balancer, shared file system, and supported database, it's time to make the necessary procurement requests. You can find a full list of system requirements on our documentation site.
Regardless of how you deploy, there may be hardware investments required. Once you check these requirements, you'll also need to tune Confluence for improved performance and ensure you and your team have the right skills and tools to investigate your instance's performance. Click here to skip ahead to learn more about performance monitoring.
On-premise vs. infrastructure as a service
One of the benefits of Atlassian's Data Center products is infra- structure choice. You can deploy on-premise or with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) vendors like AWS and Azure to best suit your company's existing investments. In fact, more and more customers are choosing to deploy Atlassian tools using IaaS providers: 62% of Atlassian’s self-managed customers are choosing to deploy their applications on a virtual architecture.
Consider which option is better for your organization, and read more about your Atlassian products and IaaS on our blog.
Review your disaster recovery strategy
Partial or complete system outage? Avoid chaos and keep business running smoothly with a disaster recovery strategy. With disaster recovery for Atlassian's Data Center products, you can configure index replication, attachment updates, and database synchronization to comply with your DR plan's specific requirements.
No two disaster recovery plans are exactly alike. Learn how to use Confluence Data Center to implement and manage a disaster recovery strategy for Confluence in our documentation.
Downloading is just the first step
Click here for an overview of the steps involved in setting up Confluence Data Center.
- Get to know Confluence Data Center
- Assess your requirements
- Provision your infrastructure
- Plan your deployment
- Install and configure Confluence Data Center
- Maintain and scale Confluence Data Center
05
Next steps
Whether you're new to Confluence Data Center, or looking to keep your existing instance healthy, here are the next steps to take.
- Download the Confluence Server mobile apps for Android & iOS
- Create templates for pages your team will use over and over
- Or, create a blueprint of templates to manage content in Confluence more easily
- Use macros to expand the capabilities of Confluence pages
- Use our keyboard shortcut guide to navigate Confluence
- Learn how to build an information architecture strategy to keep Confluence content organized
Testing, maintenance, customization, and more
Keep your instance healthy with regular testing and maintenance
It's important to regularly test and monitor your Confluence Data Center instance to keep it healthy, to ensure that your users have access to their content around the clock. Testing helps determine whether your infrastructure is capable of supporting adequate performance levels under typical loads, and monitoring ensures that Confluence will continue performing at an optimal level. Creating a strong Confluence maintenance strategy requires plenty of strategy and foresight, so use these resources to plan ahead.
Additional resources
If you're running into trouble during the setup process, we've created a troubleshooting guide to answer your most common questions. For more help, you can raise a support request or use the additional resources below to help you and your team keep your Confluence Data Center instance running smoothly.
Unlock more from Confluence with Marketplace apps
Using Confluence alone may not meet all of your organization's needs, and the Atlassian Marketplace is your go-to place for finding hundreds of apps that can extend and improve your experience using Confluence. By adding functionality, such as calendar syncing, Q&A, publishing workflows, diagramming and more, Marketplace apps help your organization carry out some of its most important functions on Confluence.
