COST relies on Cegeka to move Atlassian stack to the cloud

Our Client

The European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) is a funding organization for the creation of research networks, called COST Actions. These networks offer an open space for collaboration among scientists across Europe (and beyond) and thereby give impetus to research advancements and innovation.

COST is bottom up, this means that researchers can create a network– based on their own research interests and ideas – by submitting a proposal to the COST Open Call. The proposal can be in any science field. COST Actions are highly interdisciplinary and open. It is possible to join ongoing Actions, which therefore keep expanding over the funding period of four years. They are multi-stakeholder, often involving the private sector, policymakers as well as civil society.

Since 1971, COST receives EU funding under the various research and innovation framework programs, such as Horizon 2020.

COST funding intends to complement national research funds, as they are exclusively dedicated to cover collaboration activities, such as workshops, conferences, working group meetings, training schools, short-term scientific missions, and dissemination and communication activities.

Challenges and objectives

Cost Association was looking for a service company that could assist them with the migration of their Atlassian toolstack from server to cloud.

The main objectives aimed for where the following:

• Migrate the Atlassian applications from the server environment to the Atlassian cloud environment
• Provide the necessary support for the required licenses

Cegeka's solution

For the migration part, Cegeka used a 2 step approach: During an analysis phase COST demonstrated how the Atlassian tools were currently being used. Cegeka consultants then investigated how the tools were integrated with one another and which plugins were being relied on. Another important verification at this point was to ensure that all of the necessary features were also available in the Atlassian cloud offering. All this provided Cegeka consultants with the necessary information to compose a migration run book and the perform the initial setup of the cloud environment.

During the migration phase the first important milestone was reached after performing a dry run of the migration, ensuring all the bases were covered before attempting the actual live migration. As it happens with these initiatives, issues were found, fixes investigated, stakeholders tested the functionality and the migration run book and planning for the production migration was brought up to date.

Finally, the production migration was executed and Cegeka remained on-site for a few days to further tweak the cloud instance to COST’s needs

Results

Some key results achieved:

• Provisioning of a cloud environment matching the needs of COST
• Migrated Confluence, JIRA Software, JIRA Service Desk and Bitbucket from server to the cloud
• Maintaining the close integration with Active Directory through Atlassian Access
• Ensure integration of the cloud environment and the bamboo server installation, which was not cloud enabled at that time