This is an open and honest account of the road we took that finally came out as a new deployment model for Jama, based on Docker, which is (spoiler alert) being released around the time of writing as Jama 8.0. It’s a story about the struggles that we had on this long road, but it’s mostly a tale of how we overcame those struggles, learned a lot, and built an awesome product.

Jama Debating Scalability

Like many maturing companies Jama found itself in a situation where their monolithic software architecture prohibited scaling. Scalability is here a catch-all for many quality attributes such as maintainability across a growing team, performance, and true horizontal scalability. The solution was simple — on paper. Our software had to be split up. We are talking late 2013, micro-services are taking off, and a team starts carving out functions of the monolith into services that could then be deployed separately in our emerging SaaS environment. We are a SaaS company, after all. Or we are a SaaS company first. Or, well, we are a SaaS company which deeply cares about those on-premises customers that don’t move to the cloud… yet… for a variety of reasons, whether we like it or not.

Planning our Strategy

Will we keep on delivering the full monolith to on-premises customers, including those parts we deploy separately in SaaS?

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... read the rest of the story on Jama's blog.