PaaS: Lessons from Manufacturing

Platform-as-a-Service: Lessons from Manufacturing from ghaff

I wrote this presentation for Cloud Expo 2014 in NYC on June 11. I plan to make a narrated version available one of these days but I'm taking off on some travel and I promised I'd make the slides themselves available after the conference.

Here's the abstract:

Software development, like engineering, is a craft that requires the application of creative approaches to solve problems given a wide range of constraints. However, while engineering design may be craftwork, the production of most designed objects relies on a standardized and automated manufacturing process. By contrast, much of what's typically involved when moving an application from prototype to production and, indeed, maintaining the application through its lifecycle remains craftwork. In this session, Red Hat Cloud Product Strategist Gordon Haff discusses how a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) like Red Hat OpenShift can bring industrialization to the development and deployment of applications. By abstracting irrelevant details and automating key activities, a PaaS can do for software development productivity and quality what assembly line innovations did for manufacturing.