Hi everyone, welcome to my course study on Jira software. In this course, you will learn everything about Jira software and I will explain to you each and everything about Jira software from a user perspective and from an admin perspective as well. So, before going forward, I would like to tell you this article is for people who are brand new to Jira. Jira is a very comprehensive tool with a lot of customizable capabilities and I would like to share one secret about how personally we use Jira, we use Jira to track our day-to-day activities and we love to use it to track our activities. For this article, I have certain agenda.

What is JIRA?

So, we move forward to know more about what is Jira? So, Jira is project management, issue-tracking, and bug-tracking tool. For agile software and business teams. It is made by a company and the company name is Atlassian. It is an Australian company but now they have different offices in many countries. Actually, the name “JIRA” is inherited from the Japanese word “Go Jira” which means “Godzilla”.   

Why should we use JIRA?

There are lots of software available in the market which are very similar to Jira then why should we use Jira? Why do the people in most of the organizations prefer to go with a Jira? So, the reason is it has everything that you need to manage projects and teams and is fully customizable to your needs, you can customize your workflow, add your custom issues types, you can add your fields, and design your issue operations screen as per your team requirements and countless adds-on to further enhance the functionality. Let me tell you about the marketplace of Jira where you can find various apps which are used to enhance the functionality of Jira. Let me tell you about the official website of Atlassian www.atlassian.com and you will click on the product tab, you will see on the right-hand side, you will have an option of the marketplace so, you will click on that and you will find multiple apps already available. You can filter as per the Atlassian products, if you will click on Jira then you will see lots of apps are available like tempo timesheet, automation for Jira, and many more so you can use any app according to your requirements so let’s move forward for another one. Features Jira has lots of features that make your life easier.    

What are the JIRA products?

The other one is what are the Jira products? Many peoples are not aware of like Jira is a family of products, built to help all types of teams track their work there are four products built on Jira platforms:

• Jira core
• Jira software
• Jira service Desk
• Jira Ops

I will tell you one by one what is the meaning and what are the features for these products so, let’s start with the first one Jira core, what is Jira core? It allows you to track issues using a customizable workflow which basically determines how issues can flow from start to completion and what are the other steps along with. This basic functionality that would you get with Jira core is the base bare minimum Jira tool that you can use for simple business-related products and task management. Let’s move forward to the next one and which is Jira software with Jira software which you will be using in this complete course. You have extra agile functionality where you can track software projects with agile methodology. In other words, Jira software includes both Jira core plus agile methodology. Now, what is the Jira service desk? It is a service desk that is used for support projects using the Jira service desk you can give a better experience to your customers they can easily ask for help and your agents can respond to them in a better way. The other one is Jira Ops, which is an incident management tool. It is used to centralize alerts and notify the right people at the right time so, these are the four products that come under the Jira platforms.  

Which agile methodology is used in JIRA?

Most of the people who start to learn Jira, who use to learn Jira has this question in their mind which agile methodology is used in Jira? So, I will tell you Jira software is an agile project management tool that supports any agile methodology, be it Scrum, Kanban, or your own unique flavor. You can use Scrum, Kanban, mixed methodologies, and agile scale up to your requirement but this software fit your framework scrum, Kanban, or your unique another one so, in this course you will focus on scrum and a little bit about Kanban as well because I saw most of the organization uses scrum, Kanban as well. I wish that you will get more core fundamentals about Jira methodology and it will more guide you in the future points of view.

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What Is the DevOps Certification Service Market?

The term DevOps combines “development” and “operations” into a unified engineering philosophy. At its core, DevOps emphasises collaboration, automation, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and shared measurement between software developers and IT operations professionals. It evolved from earlier movements such as agile operations and agile system administration, broadening their scope to cover the entire software delivery lifecycle.

The DevOps Certification Service market covers the ecosystem of training providers, certification bodies, consulting firms, and managed-service vendors that help organisations adopt DevOps practices and validate practitioner skills. Market research published around 2020 projected steady growth for this segment through 2026, driven largely by accelerating enterprise digital transformation and the proliferation of cloud-native application development.

COVID-19 Impact on the Market

The COVID-19 pandemic created conflicting pressures on the DevOps Certification Service market. On one hand, widespread remote-work mandates disrupted in-person training and certification events. On the other, the sudden need to scale digital services rapidly accelerated enterprise investment in DevOps toolchains and online certification programs. Market analyses from this period incorporated macroeconomic indicators — GDP trends, inflation rates, and sector-level IT spending — to model both near-term disruption and the medium-term recovery trajectory.

Key Market Drivers

• Rising demand for application development: Increased adoption of smartphones, laptops, and tablets has expanded the addressable market for mobile and web applications, which in turn raises demand for skilled DevOps practitioners.
• Cloud-native adoption: Organisations migrating workloads to public and hybrid clouds require DevOps processes — and certified professionals — to manage CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and container orchestration.
• Regulatory and quality pressure: Industries subject to compliance requirements are investing in risk management and structured DevOps frameworks, creating demand for formal certification.
• Talent shortage: A global shortfall of qualified DevOps engineers continues to drive both employer investment in training programs and individual demand for recognised credentials.

Notable Market Participants

Market research from this period highlighted the following vendors as significant players in the DevOps Certification Service space:

• KnowledgeHut — online and instructor-led DevOps training and certification preparation
• PEOPLECERT — internationally recognised certification and examination services
• Red Hat — enterprise open-source technology vendor offering role-based DevOps and OpenShift certifications
• Neoskills — professional skills training focused on IT and DevOps domains

Competitive analysis in these reports typically covers capacity, production volume, pricing, revenue, gross margin, growth rate, import/export activity, market share, and technological developments for each listed vendor.

Market Segmentation

By Service/Product Type

• Project Management
• Business Management
• Information Technology
• Risk Management
• Training
• Consulting
• Other

By End-User / Application Platform

• Smartphones
• Laptops
• Tablets
• Other devices

Each segment is evaluated on shipments, revenue (in USD millions), average price, market share, and projected growth rate.

Regional Coverage

The research covers the following geographies:

• North America — United States, Canada, Mexico
• Europe — Germany, France, United Kingdom, Russia, Italy
• Asia-Pacific — China, Japan, South Korea, India, Southeast Asia
• South America — Brazil, Argentina, and others
• Middle East & Africa — Saudi Arabia and others

Report Structure at a Glance

Typical market research reports covering this space are structured as follows:

1. Executive Summary
2. Market Definition and Segmentation
3. Competitive Landscape and Vendor Benchmarking
4. Industry Supply Chain Analysis
5. Regional and Sub-regional Comparison
6. Competition and Trade Dynamics
7. Application-level Comparison
8. Product Type Comparison
9. Investment Analysis
10. Market Forecast through 2026

Takeaways for DevOps Practitioners and Decision-Makers

Whether you are an individual engineer choosing a certification path or an engineering leader building a training budget, the broader market trends point in the same direction: demand for verified DevOps skills continues to outpace supply. Vendor-neutral certifications (such as those from PEOPLECERT’s DevOps Institute track) and vendor-specific credentials (such as Red Hat’s RHCA paths) both have strong career and organisational ROI, depending on your toolchain and cloud footprint.

Organisations considering DevOps-as-a-Service engagements should evaluate consulting and managed-service providers not only on price and toolchain compatibility but also on the verifiable credentials held by their delivery teams — a data point this market research explicitly tracks.

Overview

Atlassian updated Jira Software to expand its road-mapping capabilities, adding a range of features designed to help engineering and product teams better visualize, communicate, and track software delivery plans. According to Atlassian, road mapping had become the fastest-adopted feature in the application’s 18-year history at the time of the announcement.

Adoption Context

Matt Ryall, then head of product for Jira Software at Atlassian, noted that road-mapping tools introduced approximately one year prior to this update had been adopted by roughly 45% of Jira customers. He also reported that end users had collectively created more than 2 million road map items within Jira by the time of the announcement.

This level of uptake placed road mapping ahead of any other feature introduced in Jira’s history in terms of adoption speed—a signal that DevOps and engineering teams were actively looking for better ways to connect delivery planning with day-to-day execution tooling.

New Road Mapping Features in Jira Software

The updated release added several concrete capabilities to the team-level road map inside Jira Software:

• Drag-and-drop dependency mapping: Teams can visually link related work items by dragging connections between them, making it easier to surface blockers and sequencing constraints before they cause delays.
• Filters for tracking projects: Users can apply filters to the road map view to focus on specific epics, teams, or time frames without losing overall context.
• Progress bars at the macro level: Each road map item now displays a progress indicator, giving stakeholders a quick, high-level view of completion status across the plan.
• Configurable hierarchy levels: Teams can define and display multiple levels of hierarchy within the road map—for example, aligning epics under themes or goals—to reflect how work is actually structured in the organization.
• Inline road map creation: A single-click inline creation option reduces friction when adding new items to an existing road map.

Confluence Integration

A significant addition for cross-functional teams is the ability to embed a live Jira road map directly inside a Confluence page. Because the embed reflects real-time Jira data, stakeholders who work primarily in Confluence—such as product managers, designers, or business analysts—can view up-to-date delivery timelines without navigating into Jira itself. This removes a common friction point in organizations where not every stakeholder holds a Jira license or regularly accesses the tool.

Atlassian’s Three-Tier Road Mapping Strategy

At the time of this announcement, Atlassian offered road-mapping capabilities at three organizational levels:

• Jira Software (team level): The core road-mapping view described above, intended for individual agile teams managing epics and sprints.
• Portfolio for Jira (program level): A planning tool designed to coordinate work across multiple teams, with capacity planning and dependency tracking at scale.
• Jira Align (enterprise level): An enterprise agility platform for aligning strategy to execution across large, multi-team organizations.

Atlassian publicly committed to improving interoperability between all three tiers during 2020, with a stated goal of allowing organizations to aggregate multiple road maps from different levels into a single consumable artifact. The company also indicated it was exploring ways to make road-mapping visibility accessible to users outside the core Jira user base.

Why This Matters for DevOps Teams

Road mapping in a DevOps context is not just a planning exercise—it is a communication mechanism between engineering teams and the rest of the business. As organizations adopt microservices architectures and continuous delivery pipelines, the number of parallel workstreams and inter-team dependencies grows significantly. Visualization tools that surface those dependencies and aggregate progress data automatically reduce reliance on manual status reporting.

Ryall emphasized that Atlassian’s broader goal was to modernize the end-user experience for the more than 65,000 organizations then using Jira, specifically by adding visualization layers that make increasingly complex software delivery landscapes easier to navigate. The drag-and-drop dependency mapping and progress bar additions reflect this direction directly.

Competitive Landscape

The project management and road-mapping tooling market was experiencing growing competition at the time of this announcement, with several venture-backed startups positioning alternatives to Jira that emphasized mobile-first interfaces and simplified data visualization. While Atlassian’s dominant market position remained intact, the acceleration of investment in the category indicated that road mapping and delivery visibility were becoming core product battlegrounds rather than ancillary features.

Summary

Atlassian’s road-mapping expansion in Jira Software addressed practical gaps that engineering teams face when communicating delivery plans to broader stakeholders. The combination of dependency visualization, Confluence integration, and hierarchical planning brought more of the planning workflow into a single tool. For teams already invested in the Atlassian ecosystem, the updates reduced the need for separate road-mapping tools while improving the fidelity of information available to non-engineering stakeholders.

What Is Anaxi?

Anaxi is a project management tool designed specifically for DevOps teams. The company reached general availability of its web application in late 2018, complementing an existing iPhone app. At the time of the announcement, an Android version was still in development.

Unlike general-purpose project management tools, Anaxi was built around the reality that modern development workflows span multiple source code repositories and involve complex dependencies between components. Its core goal is to give project managers and engineering leaders a consolidated view of work happening across those repositories.

The Problem Anaxi Aims to Solve

As DevOps practices mature, development teams increasingly distribute their work across multiple repositories. This creates a tracking and visibility problem: it becomes difficult to answer basic questions such as which code belongs to which project, which teams are making progress, and how individual components relate to one another within a larger application.

According to Anaxi CEO Marc Verstaen, one specific pain point is the labeling system used by platforms like GitHub. Labels are entered as free-form text, with no enforced taxonomy or categorization. This makes it hard to:

• Monitor all tasks associated with a specific label consistently
• Navigate from one task to the next in a logical sequence
• Get a coherent cross-repository view of project status

Anaxi addresses this by allowing project managers to edit issues and pull requests directly in the application, with changes synchronized back to the connected GitHub and Jira projects.

Analytics and Developer Productivity Tracking

Beyond repository navigation, Anaxi applies analytics to surface team and individual developer performance metrics. Examples cited at the time of launch include weekly reporting on:

• Code added and removed — tracking the net contribution of each developer over time
• Refactoring activity — identifying when teams are cleaning up existing code rather than adding features
• Code churn — measuring how frequently code is rewritten, which can indicate instability or unclear requirements

These metrics are intended to give engineering managers and project leads data to support planning decisions, rather than relying on anecdotal progress updates.

Dependency Management in a Microservices World

Verstaen highlighted a broader industry trend driving demand for tools like Anaxi: the shift from monolithic applications to microservices architectures. As organizations decompose applications into smaller, independently deployable services, the number of inter-component dependencies grows significantly.

This creates a prioritization challenge for IT operations teams. Understanding which components depend on which others is essential for sequencing development work and avoiding bottlenecks. Anaxi’s approach is to surface these dependency relationships so that project managers can make informed decisions about what to build or fix first.

Multi-Repository and Cross-Company Projects

Another practical reality driving the need for a tool like Anaxi is that projects rarely live in a single repository. Development teams often have preferences for particular platforms, and in many organizations there is insufficient authority at the project management level to mandate a single repository standard. Projects that span multiple vendors or partner companies further compound the problem, as each organization may use its own repository platform.

Anaxi’s multi-repository support is designed to let project managers work across these boundaries without requiring organizational standardization on a single tool or platform.

Business Visibility and the Role of the Modern Project Manager

The broader context for tools like Anaxi is increased executive scrutiny of software delivery timelines, particularly for applications that are directly tied to revenue generation or customer experience. Business stakeholders want real-time visibility into development progress, not quarterly status reports.

This places new demands on DevOps project managers. The traditional project management toolkit — built around waterfall-era workflows — does not map well onto iterative, repository-driven DevOps delivery models. Project managers who can adapt to these environments and deliver consistent, predictable results are increasingly valued within their organizations.

Key Takeaways

• Anaxi launched its web application in late 2018, targeting DevOps teams managing work across multiple repositories.
• It integrates with GitHub and Jira, allowing issues and pull requests to be edited in Anaxi and synced back to the source platform.
• The tool surfaces developer productivity metrics such as code churn, lines added/removed, and refactoring activity on a weekly basis.
• It is positioned to help project managers navigate the dependency complexity introduced by microservices architectures.
• The product reflects a broader market need for project management tooling that is native to modern, distributed DevOps workflows rather than adapted from traditional software development approaches.

1. Cycligent Git Tool — A Visual GUI for Git

Git is the de facto version control system for modern development teams, but its command-line interface intimidates non-developers and even occasional contributors. Frank Garcia, founder and CEO of Cycligent, described experiencing “Git paralysis” himself — being technically trained but still uncomfortable executing anything beyond the simplest commands without frequent practice.

The Cycligent Git Tool addresses this by building a visual diagram of the repository state directly into the workflow. Tyler Church, Cycligent’s director of development, noted that even as a committed command-line user, the visual diagram was compelling enough to pull him toward the GUI — and team members who had struggled with Git reported feeling more confident using it.

Key features and roadmap goals at the time of the original reporting included:

• A linear log view for users who want a straightforward chronological history
• Planned branching visualization for teams that need to see divergent development paths
• A reduced screen footprint so the tool can be docked within an IDE’s window layout
• Free to use

If your team includes product managers, designers, or other contributors who interact with Git infrequently, a GUI layer like this can dramatically reduce friction and merge mistakes caused by uncertain command execution.

2. Waffle.io — Developer-First Project Management

Most project management tools are designed for project managers, not the engineers doing the work. Waffle.io, founded by Andrew Homeyer and incubated at CA Technologies, aimed to invert that priority.

The core idea: automation should remove manual status updates from developers’ plates entirely. Waffle’s bot, Wafflebot, observes team activity and infers project state from real development events:

• When a branch is created, related work items automatically move to the in-progress column
• When a pull request is opened, the associated card moves to the review column
• Team members are assigned automatically based on ownership of the pull request

Rather than requiring developers to maintain a separate tracking tool by hand, Waffle derives project state from the code itself. For teams that live in GitHub, this integration approach keeps the board accurate without added ceremony.

3. Trello — Flexible Kanban-Style Boards for Teams

Trello took a different approach to project management: instead of enforcing a methodology, it provides flexible kanban-style boards that teams can shape to fit any workflow. Atlassian acquired Trello in early 2017, signaling strong confidence in the product’s enterprise potential and broadening its integration story alongside JIRA and Confluence.

What distinguishes Trello from a simple to-do list is its emphasis on shareable workflow templates. Teams can publish or clone boards organized around specific processes — software release cycles, bug triage workflows, sprint planning — and observers can understand the current state of work without needing a walkthrough.

Because Trello boards represent actual tasks rather than burndown abstractions, collaboration happens directly on the board rather than alongside it. This reduces the overhead of keeping a separate system of record in sync with what is actually happening in the team.

4. Concourse — Pipeline-Based CI Written in Go

Concourse is an open-source continuous integration and delivery system originally developed at Pivotal. Its defining philosophy is radical simplicity: the entire system is built on just three primitives.

• Tasks — a script executed inside an isolated Docker container; the task either passes or fails
• Resources — anything the pipeline interacts with, from Git repositories and S3 buckets to time-based triggers
• Jobs — ordered sequences of tasks and resource interactions that define a pipeline stage

By composing these three concepts, teams can model arbitrarily complex CI/CD pipelines as declarative YAML configuration. The Concourse web UI renders pipelines as interactive flow charts, making it straightforward to visualize where builds are succeeding or failing across a multi-stage delivery process.

Concourse’s container-per-task isolation means builds are reproducible and do not accumulate state between runs — a common source of flaky test results in other CI systems. For teams that value infrastructure-as-code principles and want their CI configuration to live alongside their application code, Concourse is worth evaluating.

5. Slack — Integrated Team Communication

Slack has moved well beyond chat. Its real value for engineering teams lies in its integration ecosystem and bot platform, which allows teams to route notifications, automate routine tasks, and surface operational data directly in the channels where work is already being discussed.

Notable integration categories for DevOps teams include:

• CI/CD alerts — Jenkins, CircleCI, and similar tools can post build results and deployment statuses to dedicated channels
• Incident management — PagerDuty and New Relic integrations surface alerts and acknowledge incidents without leaving Slack
• Code review — GitHub and similar integrations notify teams of pull requests, reviews, and merges
• Workflow bots — tools like Workbot automate handoffs across cloud applications; Nikabot uses conversation timestamps to replace manual timesheets

The breadth of available integrations — covering Heroku, Crashlytics, Zeplin, Rollbar, Runscope, IFTTT, and many others — means that Slack can serve as the operational dashboard for a significant portion of a team’s toolchain without requiring a custom-built solution.

6. Postman — API Design, Testing, and Lifecycle Management

Postman was created in 2012 by Abhinav Asthana, who was then an intern at Yahoo spending significant time working with APIs. Frustrated that curl was the primary tool available for API testing, he built Postman as a Chrome extension. It gained traction quickly and grew into a full-featured API development platform.

Postman supports two distinct API testing workflows that often need to coexist on the same team:

• Manual testing — compose API requests, inspect responses, and verify behavior interactively; useful for exploratory testing and debugging
• Automated testing — write test scripts that assert response shape, status codes, and values; run collections automatically as part of a CI pipeline

Asthana offered a thoughtful critique of API description languages like Swagger (now OpenAPI) and RAML as complete solutions. His argument: writing a specification does not solve the harder problem of getting teams to agree on API semantics, and the history of earlier description formats that gained little adoption supports that skepticism. Postman’s approach is to meet developers where they are — working with real requests and real responses — rather than requiring upfront specification compliance.

For teams building or consuming REST APIs, Postman remains one of the most accessible ways to establish a shared testing baseline without significant infrastructure investment.

7. Firebase — Mobile Application Backend Platform

Building a mobile application involves far more than the client-side code. Authentication, data synchronization, push notifications, crash reporting, and analytics each represent non-trivial infrastructure problems. Firebase, acquired and significantly expanded by Google, bundles these services into a unified managed platform.

Core Firebase services relevant to development teams include:

• Realtime Database and Firestore — synchronized data stores with client SDKs for Android, iOS, and web
• Authentication — managed identity with support for email/password, OAuth providers, and anonymous sign-in
• Cloud Messaging (FCM) — push notification delivery across platforms
• Crashlytics — crash reporting and stability monitoring
• Analytics — event tracking and user behavior analysis built into the same console
• Test Lab — device testing infrastructure hosted by Google

Firebase is particularly valuable for smaller teams that cannot afford to build and operate these backend services independently. By consolidating infrastructure under a single platform and billing relationship, teams can focus engineering time on the product rather than on undifferentiated backend plumbing.

8. Angular 2 — TypeScript-First Application Framework

Angular 2 represented a ground-up rewrite of the original AngularJS framework, with one of its most significant architectural decisions being the adoption of TypeScript as the primary language. The entire framework was ported to TypeScript for the 2.0 release, aligning Google’s popular front-end framework with Microsoft’s type-safe JavaScript superset.

The practical benefit for development teams is IDE tooling. Because TypeScript carries static type information, editors and IDEs can provide reliable autocompletion, safe refactoring, go-to-definition navigation, and inline error detection across large codebases. Anders Hejlsberg, technical fellow at Microsoft and one of TypeScript’s creators, framed the case clearly: writing applications of significant scale in plain JavaScript without static types puts developers at a substantial productivity disadvantage, because the tooling cannot reason about program structure without type information.

Angular 2 also unified the mobile and desktop web development story within a single framework, and at the time of the original reporting was expanding its Material Design component library. Teams already investing in TypeScript across their stack find Angular 2’s conventions and tooling a natural fit.

9. HashiCorp Vault — Secrets and Security Management for Cloud Infrastructure

Managing secrets in a cloud-native or microservices architecture is genuinely hard. Tokens, database passwords, TLS certificates, and API keys all need to be stored securely, rotated regularly, and distributed to workloads that may exist for only a few minutes before being torn down. HashiCorp Vault was built specifically to address this problem.

Vault provides:

• A unified API for reading and writing secrets from an encrypted key/value store
• Dynamic secret generation — for example, short-lived AWS IAM credentials or SSH certificates created on demand and automatically revoked after a TTL expires
• Encryption as a service, allowing applications to encrypt data without handling keys directly
• Detailed audit logging of all secret access

Mitchell Hashimoto, HashiCorp’s cofounder and CTO, articulated the broader vision: just as Terraform treats infrastructure as code, Vault is intended to make security policy declarative and auditable. In the microservices context, where there is no meaningful network perimeter and services communicate freely over the Internet, Vault’s approach of securing every service-to-service connection individually becomes especially relevant.

Vault integrates with a wide range of secret backends — AWS, Azure, GCP, databases, PKI, SSH — and is a natural complement to container orchestration platforms where workload identity and credential rotation are otherwise difficult to manage.

10. Electron — Cross-Platform Desktop Applications from Web Technologies

Electron, developed and maintained by GitHub, solves a specific problem: how to ship a desktop application using the same JavaScript, HTML, and CSS skills that web developers already have. Rather than requiring teams to learn native platform development for Windows, macOS, and Linux separately, Electron embeds the Chromium rendering engine and a Node.js runtime into a single distributable package.

Jacob Groundwater, engineering manager of the Electron team at GitHub, identified the primary business case: reusing web development talent to build desktop applications avoids hiring or retraining for native platform skills. Atom (GitHub’s text editor) and Visual Studio Code (Microsoft) are among the most widely recognized applications built on Electron, demonstrating that the framework can support professional-grade tooling at scale.

Key technical characteristics:

• Applications run on Windows, macOS, and Linux from a single codebase
• Node.js integration gives applications full filesystem and OS access — capabilities not available to browser-based web apps
• NPM’s module ecosystem is fully available, dramatically reducing the amount of infrastructure code teams need to write from scratch
• Chromium updates upstream feed performance and compatibility improvements into Electron releases over time

The trade-off is bundle size and memory usage: because each Electron app ships with its own copy of Chromium, applications are significantly larger and more memory-intensive than native equivalents. For internal tooling and developer-facing applications, this is usually an acceptable compromise.

Choosing the Right Tools for Your Team

No single tool from this list will transform a team in isolation. The most productive engineering organizations tend to choose tools that reduce friction at specific handoff points — between writing code and reviewing it, between building and deploying, between working and communicating — rather than adopting every available option at once. Evaluate each tool against a concrete pain point your team is currently experiencing, and prefer tools that integrate with your existing stack over those that require replacing it.

This article is based on reporting originally published by SD Times in February 2017. Tool capabilities, pricing, and ownership may have changed significantly since then. Verify current feature sets and availability directly with each vendor.

Containers Are Moving from Experimental to Essential

Containers have long been discussed as an optional or experimental technology—a tool for greenfield microservices projects or developer convenience. A 2017 Bain & Company study challenges that framing directly. For traditional enterprises trying to compete in an increasingly digital marketplace, the report argues, container adoption is not optional; it is a foundational step in the transition to a modern, agile IT operating model.

The key insight is that containers are not only useful for building new cloud-native applications. They are also a viable path for modernizing legacy monolithic systems that enterprises cannot easily replace.

Why Containers Matter for Legacy Enterprises

Traditional companies face a specific challenge: they must ship software faster and more reliably while maintaining the stability their operations depend on. Containers help solve this problem because they package an application together with its dependencies in discrete software layers. A single layer can be updated independently without disrupting the others—making incremental updates safer and faster.

The Docker container format, which the report references repeatedly, allows an application to be built once and moved across environments. A host system running the appropriate Linux version can recognize and run the container without additional configuration. This portability reduces environment-related failures and accelerates the handoff between development, testing, and production.

The report notes that Windows Server 2016—released in late 2016—added support for Windows containers based on the Docker format, broadening container adoption into the traditionally VM-dominated Windows data center ecosystem.

Key Findings from the Bain Study

The following findings are drawn directly from the Bain & Company report based on survey data from 449 U.S. executives and IT managers:

1. Digital maturity drives revenue growth. Companies in the top 15% of digitization progress were eight times more likely to have grown revenues faster than their industry average compared to those in the bottom 15%.
2. Containers reduce development time by 15–30%. The packaging and portability of containers eliminate a significant portion of environment setup, integration, and handoff friction in the development lifecycle.
3. Containers benefit the full application lifecycle. Beyond development, containers ease handoffs from dev to test to production and simplify ongoing application updates.
4. Early adopters report 5–15% operational savings. Containers consume fewer compute resources than virtual machines—less memory, less overhead per process—translating to measurable infrastructure efficiency gains.
5. Containers work for stateful as well as stateless applications. While containers were initially best suited to stateless, web-facing workloads, the report highlights growing success with stateful applications. Dell is cited as having successfully containerized a 20-year-old, monolithic systems management tool.
6. Container use cases are shifting. At the time of the report, web applications were the dominant container workload. The study projected that within three years, the priority would shift to containerizing custom database applications, business intelligence tools, and reporting dashboards.
7. Containers will coexist with VMs, not replace them—at least in the near term. The preferred deployment pattern at the time was running containers inside virtual machines, combining the isolation benefits of VMs with the agility of containers. Bare-metal container deployments were less common.

The Chicken-and-Egg Problem: Business Transformation vs. IT Modernization

One of the more nuanced points in the report is the question of sequencing. Should an enterprise modernize its IT infrastructure first and then use that foundation to pursue digital business opportunities? Or should business leaders define the digital strategy and then demand IT capabilities to match?

The Bain authors suggest the answer is neither—the two must proceed concurrently. Companies succeeding in the digital transition prioritize changes to their operating model (decision rights, talent, collaboration) alongside investment in core IT architecture. Business needs define the immediate technology priorities, and IT must be ready to execute rapidly once those priorities are set.

For IT leaders, this means investing proactively in technology that delivers four properties: adaptability, resilience, speed, and analytics capability. Containers, the report argues, directly support all four.

Sponsor Context and Platform Considerations

Red Hat sponsored the Bain report, reflecting its investment in container-based platforms. At the time, Red Hat’s primary container offerings included OpenShift (its container application platform) and Atomic Host (a minimal RHEL variant optimized for running containers). Readers should weigh the sponsorship context when evaluating the report’s framing, though the survey methodology and core data points were independently gathered by Bain.

The report’s conclusions are not exclusive to Red Hat’s stack. The authors note they apply equally to other container ecosystems, including Docker’s own platform, the open-source Cloud Foundry PaaS, and container host operating systems such as Ubuntu and CoreOS.

The Bottom Line for DevOps and IT Leaders

In 2017, the Bain study represented one of the first major consulting-firm endorsements of containers as a strategic enterprise technology rather than a developer convenience. The core argument remains relevant: organizations that treat containers as optional are likely to find themselves slower and more expensive to operate than competitors who have embraced container-based workflows across the software delivery lifecycle.

For DevOps teams, the practical takeaways are straightforward:

• Containers are not only for greenfield microservices—legacy application containerization is feasible and delivers real returns.
• The development-to-production handoff is a major source of efficiency gain, not just the runtime itself.
• VM and container coexistence is a valid and common architecture; organizations do not need to choose one or the other immediately.
• Stateful workloads are an increasingly viable container use case, though they require more careful orchestration planning.

As container orchestration platforms have matured significantly since 2017—with Kubernetes becoming the de facto standard—the case for enterprise container adoption has only grown stronger since this study was published.