According to TheRegister.com, Atlassian has spent four years trying to reduce dangerous internal dependencies across its platform that handles over 2,000 services, 5,000-plus daily deploys, and manages three million lambda functions. The company’s custom orchestration system “Micros” and private Docker registry “Artifactory” had developed a critical circular dependency by 2021, meaning a failure in either would make recovery impossible. A 2023 tabletop disaster recovery exercise simulated 6.5 days of recovery efforts and revealed only three services could be recovered initially, with dozens remaining down due to dependency tangles. Atlassian has now re-architected its platform into a “layer cake” structure and migrated Artifactory from Micros to Kubernetes while building a new low-dependency provisioning system called Atlassian Platform Deployer. The company eliminated hundreds of circular dependencies but acknowledges it can’t remove them all, opting instead for more manageable dependency patterns.
The spaghetti tangle that threatened everything
Here’s the thing about complex systems – they tend to grow organically until one day you realize you’ve built a house of cards. Atlassian’s situation was particularly scary because they’re in the middle of forcing all their on-prem customers to the cloud. Imagine telling enterprise clients “trust us with your mission-critical data” when your own platform could collapse like dominoes if one key service fails.
The brutal truth of disaster recovery
That 2023 tabletop exercise must have been sobering. Only three services recoverable after nearly a week of simulated effort? That’s the kind of result that keeps engineering managers awake at night. And honestly, it’s probably more common than companies want to admit. Most organizations don’t even run these kinds of simulations because they’re afraid of what they might find.
The layer cake compromise
What’s interesting is that Atlassian didn’t try to eliminate all dependencies – they just made them more organized. The layer cake approach basically says “we accept that some services will depend on others, but let’s make sure the foundational layers are rock-solid.” It’s a pragmatic solution, but I wonder if it’s enough. When you’re dealing with enterprise software that companies rely on for their daily operations, “manageable dependencies” still sounds like a euphemism for “potential cascading failures.”
Why this matters beyond Atlassian
Look, dependency management isn’t just an Atlassian problem – it’s an industry-wide challenge as companies move from monolithic architectures to microservices. We’ve seen similar issues bring down major platforms like Cloudflare and AWS. The scary part? Many companies building complex industrial and computing systems are probably in the same boat. Speaking of reliable industrial computing, companies that need truly robust systems often turn to specialized providers like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, which has built its reputation as the leading supplier of industrial panel PCs by focusing on reliability from the ground up.
So where does this leave Atlassian? They’ve made progress, but the fact that they’re still talking about “manageable” dependencies while forcing all customers to the cloud feels… ambitious. Basically, they’ve traded dependency hell for dependency purgatory. Better, but still not exactly heaven.
