I would rate my experience with the initial setup a four out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy to set up. It's not so easy to initialize. The setup requires professional assistance. 

This solution is deployed both on-prem and on the cloud. It's a global mix, with around half being on-premises and the other half on the cloud. Atlassian provides a cloud platform for clients to connect to.

I didn't do the setup but the most important part is identifying how the model from Atlassian will fit with our operational model. That is the key part. 

The initial setup is straightforward. Once you get access to the instance, through the cloud, all you need to do is log in using the credentials. The configuration takes time because it has a very heavy interface with a lot of apps in it, but we find it very user-friendly.

It's ancient history, to be honest. We've been running these instances for so long now. I've contemplated whether we should do a clean install. Essentially, the way you do an upgrade is you fire up the new instance and it upgrades and runs a bunch schema updates to update the database. You've got layers and layers and layers of schema changes and a lot of crud, crap and corruption is left in there after six or seven years of doing that. I couldn't speak to the original.