System requirements

This article lists all of the system requirements needed to set up a synchronization with Backbone.

The following information only applies to synchronizations that are created from a Jira Server or Jira Data Center deployment. Synchronizations between two Jira Cloud instances do not require changing any firewall settings because these synchronizations are running in the cloud.

Jira support

Version

Backbone Issue Sync supports Jira 7.0 and higher
All supported Jira versions can be synchronized with each other

For more details, see Supported Jira versions.

Hosting type

Backbone Issue Sync for JIRA is compatible with all JIRA products:

Jira Software
Jira Service Management
Jira Core
Jira Data Center
Jira Cloud

Open ports and firewall setup

You usually do not need to open a special port for Backbone – it uses the HTTP(S) ports used by the Jira instances that you want to synchronize, so only these ports have to be open. The default port for HTTP is port 80, and for HTTPS it is port 443. Usually Backbone can access these ports without any additional configuration. However, if your Jira instances are running on a different port than 80 or 443, you might need to adjust your firewall settings. Then, the port is usually visible in Jira's base url, like 1234 in the url http://jira.example.com:1234. In general, the following connection properties need to be considered:

Centralized Configuration: Backbone is performing most of the synchronization processes on the instance where you have created a synchronization. This means, if you connect Jira instance A and B, you only need to allow HTTP(S) requests from Jira A to B, but not from Jira B to A.

Distributed Configuration (Master/Slave): Backbone is only connecting to the local Jira instance where the relevant part of the synchronization (the master or slave configuration) has been created. If you are using a mail server as the communication channel, make sure Backbone can connect to that as well.

SSL configuration

Backbone is able to handle HTTP and HTTPS connections. You usually do not need any special SSL/HTTPS configuration in your system, except Java's default configuration. However, if you are using custom/self-signed SSL certificates or certificate authorities (CA), please make sure that you add the information into the Java trust store / 'cacert' tool. Backbone makes a request to each Jira instance where you provide a HTTPS connection for. Therefore all Jira instances need to be reachable from the Jira server where you setup a synchronization (including the Jira server itself where Backbone's synchronization is created on!).

For example: If you have two Jira instances A and B and you create a synchronization on Jira instance A connecting projects on both Jira instances A and B using https://jiraA.example.com and https://jiraB.example.com as the base urls, then Backbone must be able to reach both Jira's with their HTTPS urls https://jiraA.example.com and https://jiraB.example.com. If the SSL certificates can not be verified by one of the default CA's from Java's trust store, you need to add the relevant information there.

Server resources

Backbone usually has a minor effect on server performance. This is because by default, Backbone performs a query every 5 seconds per synchronization. This query only returns all issues (per synchronized project) that have been changed since the previous queries. This means Backbone sends two queries each 5 seconds but this interval can be configured per project for each synchronization. Because only changed issues are processed, Backbone is not especially performance-intensive and therefore doesn't typically require any additional server resources compared to using Jira normally.

However, there are two exceptions to be considered:

if you are creating a new synchronization and you initially want to synchronize 10k or more issues, please consider that this indeed can have a significant performance impact on your system during the initial synchronization of the existing issues. As a best practice, we recommend to use a JQL filter to gradually increase the number of synchronized issues to not overload your Jira instance.
if you are planning to create more than 10 synchronizations on your Jira instance, consider that each synchronization will perform two queries as explained above. If you are experiencing slowness of your Jira system, we recommend to evaluate if the queries can be changed to run each minute (or more) and also if you can increase the allocated memory of your Jira instance.

Browser support

There are no known issues with the most common browsers Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge.