After eleven-year wait, Atlassian customers promised custom domains in 2023

Updated On July 8, 2011, Atlassian Cloud posted a Jira ticket titled "Allow custom domains for Cloud apps".

2011 is not a typo. And as of today, more than eleven years later, the ticket – now known as "CLOUD-6999" to reference its URL – is still open. But The Register has learned relief is coming.

Atlassian and its customers like the idea of allowing custom domains for its products, because presently they're hosted as subdomains – if The Register used Jira, we could pick theregister.atlassian.net. The ticket proposed making it possible for customers to use their own second-level domain instead, producing URLs such as jira.theregister.com or theregister.com/confluence. That would be neater and perhaps allow self-hosting.

No-one seems to know just why it's taken over a decade to get this done.

Certainly not Atlassian customers, who over the years have posted over 1,300 comments on the ticket.

CLOUD-6999 became something of a legend as users wondered if any vendor had left a ticket open for longer – or if any vendor would leave a ticket open for longer.

The ticket acquired a certain cult status, with an artist who goes by "Revolving Toilet" even turning it into a Redbubble t-shirt. The Register asked Mr or Ms Toilet to comment on the situation, but did not receive a reply.

• Atlassian reveals critical flaws in almost everything it makes and touches
• Atlassian: Unpatched years-old flaw under attack right now to hijack Confluence
• Atlassian comes clean on what data-deleting script behind outage actually did

In 2021, Atlassian started posting substantial updates detailing progress on CLOUD-6999. While the Atlassian employee responsible for the ticket changed, the updates emerged with a steady quarterly cadence and explained that Atlassian had a team assigned to custom domains – and that group was making decent progress.

But a promised July 2022 update did not appear.

Followers of CLOUD-6999 noticed the absence of an update, and weren't happy. Reactions ranged from suggestions Atlassian is only posting news on the ticket to avoid customer anger, to a dark hint that Atlassian promised an update in July – but didn't specify July of any particular year.

The Register could not resist asking Atlassian what on Earth is going on.

An Atlassian spokesperson responded: "In an effort to provide the most up-to-date and meaningful information with the customers anticipating this feature we opted to delay a status update to the feature request ticket for Cloud-6999 from the end of July to next week, the week of August 15, 2022."

Why Atlassian didn't just post that on the ticket is unknown.

But the company did share a little about the ticket's resolution, telling The Register "custom domains are on the Atlassian public cloud roadmap, and we anticipate early access availability in 2023."

"We have multiple teams involved in that effort and are excited to be making steady progress on this long-awaited feature."

But we weren't told if those teams expect to complete the job in 2023 – so CLOUD-6999 could easily stay open deep into next year, or beyond.

If you know of a longer-lived ticket, or have tracked CLOUD-6999, feel free to contact me or post a comment. ®

Updated at 2:15AM UTC, August 15th Atlassian updated CLOUD-6999 on August 12th with news that "Since April, we have continued working on foundational platform building blocks, engaged our various Jira and Confluence product teams to align timelines, and partnered with our security team to advise on our work-in-progress builds. I am happy to report we remain on track for early access in 2023."

The posts explains the project has moved slowly because "implementing custom domains in a multi-tenant SaaS architecture with hundreds of thousands of customers requires a high degree of care."

"We are working closely with each product team to ensure that all existing cloud products will continue to work as expected in a tenant with custom domains enabled."