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European customers of Atlassian’s various cloud software products should see increases in performance with the introduction of European-based infrastructure running on Amazon Web Services, as Atlassian increases its use of the leading public cloud vendor and gives customers some help should data localization laws become fashionable.

Atlassian is planning to make the announcement Tuesday at the first Atlassian Summit in Europe, where nearly half of its customer base lives, said company President Jay Simons in a recent interview. Founded in Australia, Atlassian develops several different tools for software developers and product management teams, such as the JIRA development console, the Trello product management app, and HipChat, a chat service popular among development teams.

Until now, all Atlassian customers could opt to run the software on their own machines, deploy and manage it themselves on AWS, or have Atlassian manage everything on the company’s own data centers. However, all of these workloads were based in the U.S.

“We’re just anticipating a lot more demand in Europe for the cloud,” Simons said.

A sample dashboard of Atlassian's JIRA product.
A sample dashboard of Atlassian’s JIRA product.

Moving infrastructure closer to the user results in a noticeable increase in performance, even from the best infrastructure providers on the planet, because latency is always going to be somewhat of a problem. Atlassian’s first European region will be based in Ireland, and it will introduce other European regions over time, Simons said.

Atlassian will manage the deployments for customers who opt for its cloud service, but all of the European cloud workloads will run on AWS: the company is not setting up data centers in Europe. Atlassian has been moving in this direction for a while, Simons said, because the economics just make too much sense.

But this move isn’t just a cost and performance issue. International cloud companies operating in Europe are very wary about possible data localization laws, which can require that data be stored within a country’s borders. This could make it extremely expensive and complicated to serve European customers, and this move least ensures that Atlassian has a physical presence in the European Union.

The company also plans to announce new versions of its Bitbucket and Bamboo products at the Euro Summit. It’s now easier to ensure compliance procedures in Bitbucket with a new “committer verification hook,” and Bamboo users can now “define their build plan configurations as code and store them along their code base, benefiting from code reuse, code reviews and versioning,” Atlassian said in a statement.

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