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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the PaaS

Abstract:

PaaS has been striking fear in to the heart of many a developer, with its "noops" connotations and flashy, irritating marketing. I would like to present open-source PaaS as an enabler of devops and not the enemy. Businesses are using PaaS to reduce the feedback cycle time on their ideas - so we don't waste our effort building platforms and services that aren't useful.

Developers and operations can use PaaS to deliver value quickly, and then develop their PaaS as required. PaaS enables many aspirational patterns such as deploying early to a production-like environment, Infrastructure as Code and using a single deployment mechanism. I will be exploring the PaaS implementations I've been delivering for various organisations and the positive and negative ways that a PaaS can impact team collaboration and delivery.

PaaS is not a silver bullet. Teams still need to collaborate to deliver services to ensure expectations are met; PaaS does not equal infinite scalability, availability and functionality. Compliance and security issues do not magically disappear. Consuming closed-source PaaS may hinder future capabilities and delivery. However, PaaS also isn't a magical foreign land; we can build, maintain and develop PaaSes using the tools we all know and love. I will look at the use of Chef, Vagrant, Git, Graylog2 and others. You'll be surprised how familiar a PaaS actually is.

It's our responsibility as people tasked to deliver services to use the right tool for the job, and I think PaaS will be playing an important role in the lives of developers, operations and businesses in the future. We should look at how we can get the most out of it.

Speaker: Colin Humphreys