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Atlassian announced on Tuesday that Forge, a platform for developers seeking to build cloud apps for the Atlassian Marketplace or personal use, will become generally available. The new platform will make building apps across Atlassian easier, starting with Confluence and Jira.

It will make it easy for developers to build B2B applications that can meet the needs of large enterprise customers using Atlassian. Atlassian has spent two years and a decent amount of money to make Forge, a serverless platform that will remove the heavy lifting that comes with developing apps.

The successor to Atlassian Connect

As Mike Tria, the Atlassian head of platform engineering said, the company is essentially ‘future proofing’ the code by abstracting how the compute works under the hood. As a third-party app developer on Atlassian, it is important to feel safe, which is what Tria says the company seeks to do with this release. The developers can feel safe knowing that they have built their app and however it is deployed, everything remains serverless.

Until now, developers seeking to extend Atlassian’s products could use the Atlassian Connect framework. Forge is not like Connect, since it is built from scratch with developers on Atlassian in mind.

An opportunity for developers

Because the apps built on Forge are hosted and use Atlassian compute, it is easier to ensure that the apps comply with GDPR and other regulatory requirements from different parts of the world.

The Atlassian Marketplace is an opportunity for developers who want to work with enterprises. It is one of the largest B2B SaaS marketplaces, with a revenue of $1.7 billion since its launch in 2012. More than 60% of the Atlassian customers (200,000+) use at least one app or integration from the marketplace, including enterprises. Forge is a timely release that is meant to change things and open up more opportunities.