Upgrade strategy
Asked by MARIEM QARA:

I'm looking for some clarification on the upgrade processes and release strategies for Jira Cloud:

1. **Feature Activation:** How does the activation process work for new features? Are there specific circumstances that dictate whether features are automatically activated or require admin intervention?

2. **Communication:** What is the standard process for communicating upcoming upgrades and changes to users? How far in advance are users typically notified?

3. **Service Downtime:** What are the expected downtimes during major updates, and how are these communicated to users?

Any insights or resources you could share would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you!


Answers:
author: Andy Heinzer
body: Hi [@MARIEM QARA](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5597677)

The response from [@Dirk Ronsmans](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/124602) is accurate. I understand you are looking for more information about the frequency of major updates that require downtime.

Every Atlassian cloud site will have a nightly maintenance window. This is typically a 2 hour window of time daily that typically starts at 1 AM of the local timezone. [Keep track of maintenance windows](https://support.atlassian.com/organization-administration/docs/keep-track-of-maintenance-windows/) has more details about this. Most major changes will plan to use that interval of time to schedule changes to the site if possible.

It's possible that your site could be unavailable during the nightly maintenance window. Only if we know the changes made to the site would exceed the time available in that maintenance window would Atlassian reach out to you to notify you of the changes in advance.

Major changes don't typically happen to every site on a daily basis. However the way changes are applied to our Cloud sites allow for even minor updates/changes to happen in a matter of a few minutes to a few hours in some cases, or in a matter of several days to weeks depending on the change.

Reviewing <https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/blog> you can see that several updates often have a wide range of time in which this update could be applied to a specific Atlassian Cloud site.

I hope this helps.

Andy


author: Dirk Ronsmans
body: Hi [@MARIEM QARA](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5597677) , Welcome to the community.

> **Feature Activation:** How does the activation process work for new features? Are there specific circumstances that dictate whether features are automatically activated or require admin intervention?

It depends on the feature to be honest. Certain items are just generally changed, but other do require or allow you to activate them or leave them deactivated. Most of them however are activated by default.
> **Communication:** What is the standard process for communicating upcoming upgrades and changes to users? How far in advance are users typically notified?

For this as well, not really a fixed schedule. You can use the Product updates page on your admin hub or rely on in product notifications. Depending on your subscription you can also set your product on a certain release track which will give you more heads up when something will change.

<https://support.atlassian.com/organization-administration/docs/keep-up-with-atlassian-changes-to-products/>

> **Service Downtime:** What are the expected downtimes during major updates, and how are these communicated to users?

By default any changes are seamless and without downtime. If for some reason a maintenance downtime is required this will be communicated in the product and through email to the admins a long time ahead.


Tags: cloud

jira-service-management

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