Software development, like manufacturing, 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 moving an application from prototype to production and, indeed, maintaining the application through its lifecycle has often remained craftwork.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Gordon Haff, senior cloud strategy marketing and evangelism manager at Red Hat, discussed the many lessons and processes that DevOps can learn from manufacturing and the assembly line-like tools, such as Platform-as-a-Service, that provide the necessary abstraction and automation to make industrialized DevOps possible.