Deploy JIRA and Confluence on Kubernetes

Published in

ITNEXT

3 min readMay 16, 2018

Atlassian JIRA Software and Confluence are a nice agile management tool. We can start using JIRA and Confluence on Atlassian Cloud in a few minutes but we still need a private server in some cases.

I just published Kubernetes Helm charts for JIRA and Confluence. You can easily deploy JIRA and Confluence on your Kubernetes cluster.

Getting Started

Install tools

Make sure you can access to the cluster using helm command.

brew install kubernetes-helm
helm init

In this article, we use Helmfile for configuration management.

curl -L -o ~/bin/helmfile https://github.com/roboll/helmfile/releases/download/v0.17.0/helmfile_darwin_amd64
chmod +x ~/bin/helmfile

Deploy JIRA

Get the repository of the chart.

git clone https://github.com/int128/devops-kompose
cd devops-kompose

Create helmfile.yaml for your cluster. For example, if you deploy JIRA on https://jira.example.com using an Ingress, it would be the following:

releases:
  - name: atlassian-jira-software
    namespace: devops
    chart: ./atlassian-jira-software
    values:
      - ingress:
          enabled: true
          hosts:
            - jira.example.com
        jira:
          reverseProxyHost: jira.example.com
        resources:
          limits:
            memory: 1536Mi
          requests:
            memory: 1536Mi

Now apply change.

helmfile syncexec: helm repo update
Hang tight while we grab the latest from your chart repositories...
...
Release "atlassian-jira-software" has been upgraded. Happy Helming!
LAST DEPLOYED: Wed May 16 09:32:11 2018
NAMESPACE: devops
STATUS: DEPLOYEDRESOURCES:
==> v1/Pod(related)
NAME                                      READY  STATUS       RESTARTS  AGE
atlassian-jira-software-7997fcf5c7-qk84j  1/1    Terminating  0         12h==> v1/PersistentVolumeClaim
NAME                     STATUS  VOLUME                                    CAPACITY  ACCESS MODES  STORAGECLASS  AGE
atlassian-jira-software  Bound   pvc-f6a375fc-15e0-11e8-9a6e-06365716f47a  8Gi       RWO           gp2           5d==> v1/Service
NAME                     TYPE       CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP  PORT(S)   AGE
atlassian-jira-software  ClusterIP  100.68.177.22  <none>       8080/TCP  5d==> v1beta2/Deployment
NAME                     DESIRED  CURRENT  UP-TO-DATE  AVAILABLE  AGE
atlassian-jira-software  1        0        0           0          5d==> v1beta1/Ingress
NAME                     HOSTS                     ADDRESS           PORTS  AGE
atlassian-jira-software  jira.example.com          1.2.3.4...  80     5dNOTES:
Atlassian JIRA Software is starting now.

Open https://jira.example.com and setup your JIRA server. You may need an external database such as AWS RDS.

Deploy Confluence

You can deploy Confluence in the same way. If you deploy Confluence on https://wiki.example.com using an Ingress, your helmfile.yaml would be the following:

releases:
  - name: atlassian-confluence
    namespace: devops
    chart: ./atlassian-confluence
    values:
      - ingress:
          enabled: true
          hosts:
            - wiki.example.com
        confluence:
          reverseProxyHost: wiki.example.com
        resources:
          limits:
            memory: 1800Mi
          requests:
            memory: 1800Mi

Then apply change:

helmfile sync

Advanced Topics

Helmfile template

Helmfile supports template such as variable substitution. You can create a template and distribute it for your various projects.

For example, you can put a placeholder in helmfile.yaml as follows:

- name: atlassian-jira-software
    namespace: devops
    chart: ./atlassian-jira-software
    values:
      - ingress:
          enabled: true
          hosts:
            - jira.{{ requiredEnv "DEVOPS_DOMAIN" }}
        jira:
          reverseProxyHost: jira.{{ requiredEnv "DEVOPS_DOMAIN" }}

Create .env with the following variable:

export DEVOPS_DOMAIN=example.com

Apply change.

source .env
helmfile sync

Then JIRA will be deployed on jira.example.com.

Persistence

JIRA/Confluence stores data into both a database and a persistent volume. If you are using an internal database (not recommended), both are in the same volume.

By default this chart create an 8GB volume. You can change the size in helmfile.yaml as follows:

releases:
  - name: atlassian-jira-software
    namespace: devops
    chart: ./atlassian-jira-software
    values:
      - ingress:
          enabled: true
          hosts:
            - jira.example.com
        jira:
          reverseProxyHost: jira.example.com
        persistence:
          size: 100Gi

You should periodically take a snapshot of the database and the volume for backup.

Memory

JIRA/Confluence requires much memory for comfortable experience.

By default a pod requires 1536MB of memory. It may be enough in most cases but you can increase or decrease memory by changing helmfile.yaml as follows:

releases:
  - name: atlassian-jira-software
    namespace: devops
    chart: ./atlassian-jira-software
    values:
      - ingress:
          enabled: true
          hosts:
            - jira.example.com
        jira:
          reverseProxyHost: jira.example.com
          javaOptions: -Xmx2g -Xms2g
        resources:
          limits:
            memory: 2560Mi
          requires:
            memory: 2560Mi

You must give both javaOptions and resources for preventing OOM killer. Currently JIRA does not support -XX:+UseCGroupMemoryLimitForHeap option.

Conclusion

You can easily deploy JIRA and Confluence on your Kubernetes cluster using the Helm charts.