Some months ago, I earned the Atlassian Forge Fundamentals certificate (ACH-805).
The Rovo Fundamentals exam I sat earlier this year was about how teams find and use information inside Atlassian Cloud. Forge is the other half of that story — it’s about how the apps, integrations, and automations that sit on top of Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management actually get built and run. After years of working with these products as a consultant and admin, this exam closed a gap on the engineering side of the platform.
Forge: Atlassian’s Native Cloud Runtime
For a long time, building on top of Atlassian meant choosing between point-and-click automation rules or standing up your own server somewhere to host a Connect app. Forge changes that calculus. It’s Atlassian’s hosted runtime — your code, your storage, and your UI components all run inside Atlassian’s own infrastructure, not on a server you have to patch, scale, or secure yourself.
That matters for three reasons I kept running into while studying:
- No infrastructure to manage. You write the function, Forge runs it. There’s no EC2 instance or Lambda layer to think about on your side.
- Security sits closer to the platform, not bolted on. Because the app runs inside Atlassian’s environment, permission scoping and data access become part of the app’s design from day one, not an afterthought handled by a separate hosting layer.
- It’s becoming the foundation for more than “apps.” Forge is now also the mechanism behind custom Rovo agent actions, which means the skills that get you a working Forge module also get you a working AI agent extension. Rovo and Forge are converging.
Read more about Atlassian Forge here.
Inside the Certification
The ACH-805 exam tests four areas, and unlike some of Atlassian’s other fundamentals exams, the weighting is published upfront:
- Forge architecture — 35% — how Forge apps are structured, how the runtime executes your code, and the app lifecycle from installation through execution.
- Building simple use cases — 30% — UI Kit components, storage and data persistence, making API requests, handling external integrations, and responding to triggers and events.
- Building and deploying a Forge app — 20% — using the Forge CLI to create, test, and deploy apps, and managing versions across environments.
- Troubleshooting and debugging — 15% — reading Forge logs, recognizing common error patterns, and tuning app performance.
That weighting tells you where to spend your study time: architecture and basic implementation patterns together make up nearly two-thirds of the exam, so knowing how a Forge app is put together matters more than memorizing CLI flags.
Logistics: 20 questions, 45 minutes, a 70% passing score (14 out of 20), free to take, non-proctored, and open-book — you’re allowed to keep the Forge documentation open while you take it. The certificate is valid for 12 months. Atlassian opened the exam in December 2025, and it’s deliberate about calling this a certificate rather than a certification — a small distinction worth tracking if you’re keeping your Atlassian Credential Holder (ACH) history precise.
A Practical Starter Checklist (What I Did Before the Exam)
- Built and deployed a small Forge app end-to-end with the CLI — create, deploy, install — so the path from code to a running app on a real site wasn’t abstract.
- Worked with UI Kit components inside an actual module rather than just reading about them, since the rendering model sticks better hands-on.
- Wired up Forge’s storage API and a scheduled trigger to get a real feel for execution context and how events actually fire.
- Deliberately broke something in a test app and read through the resulting Forge logs, so I’d already seen what failure output looks like before I needed to recognize it under exam conditions.
Small, hands-on reps like these matter more for this exam than memorizing documentation, because several questions are really asking “have you actually run this.”
Beyond the Exam: Why Forge Matters
Atlassian has been steadily moving app development off self-hosted Connect infrastructure and onto Forge for a while now. That’s not just a developer-experience improvement — it’s a platform decision. When the apps that extend Jira and Confluence run inside Atlassian’s own runtime, Atlassian controls the security model, the data residency story, and increasingly, how those apps plug into Rovo.
For developers, this means less time managing servers and more time thinking about permission scopes, storage limits, and the constraints of a sandboxed runtime.
For consultants and admins — even ones who aren’t writing Forge apps daily — it means client-built integrations and automations are increasingly Forge apps under the hood. Knowing how they’re structured, where their logs live, and what their failure modes look like is becoming as relevant as knowing your way around a Jira permission scheme.
For the ecosystem, it’s Atlassian standardizing where logic lives. That has real implications for Marketplace partners, but also for anyone advising a client on a build-it-yourself-or-buy-it decision.
What This Means for Atlassian Professionals
- CLI fluency matters more than point-and-click skill now. Forge rewards people comfortable in a terminal, not just in an admin console.
- Permission scoping is a design decision, not a checkbox. The exam’s weight on architecture and runtime reflects how much of Forge’s risk surface is determined before you write a line of business logic.
- Logs are a transferable skill. Reading Forge logs well is the same muscle as reading CloudWatch logs on AWS — if you already do one, the other comes faster than you’d expect.
Certification to Vision
For me, the Forge Fundamentals certificate is less about the badge and more about closing the loop on the Atlassian stack. Rovo Fundamentals taught me how information moves through the platform; Forge Fundamentals taught me how the platform itself gets extended. Together, they cover both sides of what it actually means to work across consulting and development as an Atlassian Credential Holder.
If you’re already comfortable in Jira and Confluence as an admin, sitting the Forge exam is worth it even if you don’t plan to build apps full-time. It changes how you read a client’s environment — you start seeing the Forge apps underneath the integrations, instead of just the integrations themselves.
Stay Clouding!
