Configuration Manager for Jira SPI: Seamless data portability for third-party Jira apps


The Atlassian ecosystem of vendors offers a wide variety of apps designed to enhance and improve the features of Jira Software and Jira Service Desk (among other products of the Atlassian stack). Most apps integrate with core Jira functionality and thus contain references to different Jira configuration and data, which makes the data portability of apps somewhat problematic. Throughout the years, it has been a significant challenge for admins and vendors to find a quick, easy and viable way to transfer app configuration and data between instances, without compromising their configuration or data integrity.

Botron Software’s team introduces a brand new solution which makes the data portability of Jira apps a seamless process, and will ultimately foster the cooperative spirit of the Atlassian community of vendors.

Introducing Service Provider Interface (SPI) for Configuration Manager for Jira

For years, the powerful capabilities of Configuration Manager for Jira have enabled admins to quickly capture and transfer a diverse set of Jira configurations and data, including some of the most popular apps. To accommodate ALL Jira apps available on the marketplace, our team has been working on a new technological solution for seamless data portability – Service Provider Interface (SPI).

Service Provider Interface (SPI) is designed to enable the entire Atlassian ecosystem of vendors to enhance their apps for quick and easy portability, without compromising their configuration and data integrity. SPI will ultimately bridge the gap between a platform and apps by offering a streamlined process that will enable the Atlassian customer base to be compliant with the enterprise best practices of Dev-Staging-Production and migration processes for Jira Software and Jira Service Desk.

The configuration of apps may be arbitrary but may also contain references to other configuration elements in Jira (priorities, resolutions, custom fields, filters, etc.). As part of the robust process, CMJ’s SPI technology provides the means for collecting app references on the source instance and properly resolving them on the target instance.

The collect-and-resolve process of moving configuration and data involves the capture of all these references, their analysis for dependencies and usage from the source server. For a successful deployment on the target server, a similarly complex process takes place and resolves these references with new or matching objects.

The core of the SPI technology handles the entirety of this complex logic generically, thus ensuring that the app-specific information and implementation is rather minimal. SPI provides the means for collecting such references on the source instance and correctly resolving them on the target instance.

Vendors are now able to quickly adapt their apps for seamless portability by adding the SPI as a maven dependency and implement one of the SPI interfaces, depending on what type of configuration you want to support. For more information regarding the process, check out our documentation.

The Configuration Manager SPI is licensed under the Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0).