at a glance
In this announcement, we are sharing an early look at plans to phase out support for Connect. For owners of business critical Connect apps, including partners and customers with custom apps, we will provide ample time to explore requirements and arrive at a fair timeline for end of support, together.
In 2014, the year Connect was introduced, the Atlassian ecosystem was a very different place. We didn’t have apps – we had add-ons – which installed into “JIRA OnDemand”, the precursor to Jira Cloud. That year, Atlassian hit 33,000 customers and the Marketplace reached $20 million in sales.
Today, Atlassian’s 300,000+ customers centralize teamwork on a world-class platform that includes products like Loom, Jira Service Management, Compass and Jira Product Discovery. Cross-platform experiences like Analytics and Atlassian Intelligence enable some of the world’s largest companies, including NASA, Reddit, Rivian, Domino’s Pizza Enterprises Ltd, and PayPal, to connect knowledge and insights across their organizations. And our Marketplace has grown by leaps and bounds. What began as $20 million in lifetime sales has surpassed $4 billion, at an accelerating pace.
Connect pioneered the ecosystem of Cloud apps we know today and enabled many partners to build successful businesses. But today, the needs of our customers and partners have changed. The bar has risen for security, privacy and transparency. In recent years, we reimagined what a truly cloud-native extensibility platform could look like, and Forge was the result. Forge incorporates the lessons we learned from building and running Connect, combined with invaluable insights from our customers and partners. Since then, Forge has matured, offering data residency, remote integrations, and increasingly complex compute and storage inside Atlassian’s secure environment. Forge has dramatically increased developer velocity, with scalability and security features like tenant isolation built into the platform, requiring no additional work from developers.
We firmly believe Forge is the way we will bring the future of extensibility to our partners and customers. Forge unlocks an expanded surface area for extensibility in Automations, Analytics, and the new market opportunities these will bring. This is not possible on Connect today due to its tight coupling with our products (Confluence and Jira) and an inability to quickly expand and support new products and their shared capabilities. As we shared recently, we are only delivering new extensibility on Forge, enabling us to move faster and deliver new opportunities to the Marketplace.
Moving toward a Forge-only future
To pave the way for Atlassian’s next phase of growth and platform extensibility, Forge will become Atlassian’s only app development platform, and we will progressively phase out support for Connect over an extended period of time.
We deeply value the Atlassian ecosystem, which has grown alongside us over the years into a strong, vibrant community. We understand how important it is to be transparent about the future of Connect. While we’re still finalizing the details and the timeline, we want to share our current thinking early and ensure you have plenty of time and support to plan your transition to Forge.
Determining a fair and appropriate end of support date will be a joint effort with our partners and other app builders. Over the coming months, we’ll have conversations to thoroughly understand requirements before announcing an official date. There will be multiple phases leading up to the end of support and we will provide clearer guidance on timing once we’ve had an opportunity to understand app builders’ requirements.
Phases leading up to end of support
While the date for end of support has not yet been determined, our thinking on the steps and progression has come together. End of support will take place over three phases, defined below. Before we enter a phase, certain readiness pre-requisites must be met. Each phase will have an applicable (6 – 12 month) deprecation notice period from its formal announcement, providing partners sufficient time to plan and align. We will wait to define timing for each of these phases pending partner feedback.
Pre-requisites and delivery status will be tracked in the developer documentation and public roadmap, which will serve as the source of truth for ongoing feature work toward end of support. You can learn more about Connect capabilities coming to Forge via the Connect Equivalence Roadmap and new capabilities on the Forge Roadmap.
See Forge Terminology for definitions of Forge remote, Connect-on-Forge, and other terms associated with transitioning Connect apps to Forge.
Phase 1: No net-new Connect apps listed on Marketplace
In this initial phase, all new apps published on Atlassian’s Marketplace must be created on Forge. Already today, the overwhelming majority of new apps published are Forge apps and as we progress towards end of support, Forge will become the only platform for the creation of new apps. New apps submitted to the Marketplace may not contain any Connect modules.
Existing Connect apps on the Marketplace are not impacted by this change.
Phase 2: All app updates must be delivered via Forge
In the second phase, only apps with a Forge manifest may receive updates, and we will conclude support for updating Marketplace apps via the Connect descriptor. This ensures actively maintained and developed apps are readily onboarded onto Forge. As part of this phase, Marketplace will cease polling for any new Connect descriptor updates. The ability to upload new Connect apps to Jira and Confluence instances will also be phased out.
Phase 3: Connect enters end of support
In the third and final phase, Connect will enter an end of support state (defined below), where apps can continue to utilize Connect modules, but do so at their own risk. Connect will no longer evolve with our products and platform, and as significant changes accumulate in our products over time, Connect integration points may become incompatible.
Defining end of support
Connect consists of a collection of capabilities (JWT, descriptors, etc.), modules (web items, web panels, macros, etc.) and extensibility (APIs and Javascript APIs). All of these Connect components will be in scope for end of support.
In practice, end of support means ‘use at your own risk.’ When end of support takes effect, Connect will no longer receive new updates or features. Only critical or security-related bugs will be addressed, and any bugs which are deemed to be non-critical or do not also impact a Forge equivalent will not be fixed. Support queries for the Forge platform will be prioritized, and SLOs for responding to ECOHELP tickets and escalations related to Connect and Connect modules/extensibility will be lengthened or removed. Customers who have Connect apps installed won’t lose access to the app, but this is an undesired state for customers due to lack of support, and we will message accordingly to customers on the Marketplace. In addition, new versions of the app will not be able to be delivered on Connect.
When Connect integration points become incompatible with the future state of our products, they may be deprecated and become Forge-only. We will make these assessments on a case by case basis, and we do not plan to retire Connect as a whole at this stage.
Planning the journey to Forge
Over the next two months, Atlassian will conduct feedback sessions with partners to measure level of effort and understand blockers that would prevent partners from moving away from unsupported Connect capabilities. To ensure we gather comprehensive data during this period, we are asking partners to begin planning a pathway to Forge and conduct an assessment to identify blockers.
The journey to Forge will not look the same for every app:
- Some app builders may choose to move entirely to Forge, adopting hosted storage and compute. Apps that go this route gain a strong trust signal valued by customers, and on-Atlassian storage is a pre-requisite for earning the Runs on Atlassian badge.
- Some app builders may elect to maintain backend services, using Forge remote. This is perfectly valid, and Forge remote is not going away.
- Many apps will continue to use Connect modules and Forge modules at the same time, gradually replacing Connect modules with their Forge equivalents as Connect modules become unsupported.
We know one consideration for partners and other app owners is future Forge pricing. The Forge manifest, CLI, remotes, and user interface are not in scope for upcoming Forge pricing announcements. Hosted capabilities, including compute and storage, will be considered paid features under Forge’s future consumption-based, freemium pricing model. Forge is free until January 2026, and directional pricing details will be shared in early 2025. We will provide these directional pricing details to partners before setting a date for end of support.
Step one: Adopting the Forge manifest
Although the journey to Forge can take multiple forms, it always begins with the same first step. Adopting the Forge manifest is a semi-automated process enabling partners to bring their existing apps to the Forge platform. Converting to the Forge manifest unlocks the ability to additively adopt Forge modules or replace existing Connect modules with Forge ones. This migration path is Generally Available as of October 2024.
The Forge manifest is important because:
- It allows a Connect app to be recognized as a Forge app by Atlassian’s app registry
- The app can then run Connect modules and Forge modules at the same time
- Apps need the manifest before they can adopt new Forge-only features
We recommend all partners begin reviewing the documentation on how to convert Connect descriptors to a Forge manifest, identifying any potential blockers, and putting in place a plan and a timeline to make these this change in production apps. We know some partners are paused until the delivery of data residency for Forge remote, and the EAP is now available for realm pinning, with Preview for realm migration expected in March. Partners can sign up for the EAP here.
Converting to the Forge manifest is a step most partners can take today to ensure apps are ready for the future, and there is no impact on the Connect app’s current installations.
In Summary
In order to create new value for customers and new opportunities for partners, we have to continuously improve our technology. Modernizing our ecosystem on Forge will require joint effort over a period of time – it will not happen overnight and we can’t do it alone.
Many of our partners and customers will remember a similarly monumental shift: the transformation from server to Cloud. We bet on Cloud because we knew it was key to delivering the innovative platform customers needed. When we announced server end of support, we knew it would be a big transition, and we set to work ensuring Cloud was ready. For customers with the most complex needs, we provided Data Center as a stepping stone or long term solution.
We are at a similar inflection point with Connect and Forge. We know some apps will need things in Forge that don’t yet exist, and we are committed to building them. Today, nearly every app has the ability to adopt Forge remote capabilities as a stepping stone or as a permanent solution. Like our customers on Data Center, we will continue to support partners and app builders using remote capabilities while we strengthen Forge.
Before we set an official date for end of support, we will commit to the following, over the next several months:
- Work with partners and app builders to collect feedback, and use this information to shape the official end of support timeline. We will commit to coming back with an official timeline in early 2025.
- Deliver high-priority requirements we know partners need, including clarity on pricing for Forge, data residency for Forge remote, and improving the upgrade process.
We’re seeking your feedback to help us shape the next steps for Connect. Partners may schedule time for feedback through their TPMs, and we are collecting feedback from all Connect builders via this survey.