Recently, we received an inquiry on whether it is possible to run Atlassian JIRA on Amazon EC2 Micro Instance. The free tier allows up to 750 hours of runtime each month.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

We were curious on its performance and did some testing on it.

We did the setup with

• RHEL 6 64-bit
• Atlassian JIRA 6.1.2
• Oracle JDK 1.7.0_45
• Apache Tomcat 7.0.29
• MySQL Database Server 5.1.69

The specs for the virtual machine

• 6 GB of disk space
• 590 MB of ram
• Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 0 @ 2.00GHz

The setup was completed successfully and we were able to create issues within JIRA. However, the performance seemed to be quite bursty as compared to our typical use. Sometimes an action is almost instantaneous, sometimes, a log in can take longer than 5 seconds.

In the end, we recommended him to consider upgrading the server specs or to take a look at Atlassian OnDemand. The cost of ownership will be lower with automatic version upgrades and data backups.

For a comparison on the differences between onDemand and self hosted, you can refer to our infographic.