Mickaël’s Weblog

…SF as Software Factory, I mean a full featured development infrastructure. This became obvious to me when I read the post of Ayende on his vision of entreprise platform.

Ayende had the idea to base the system on code versioning system. This is definitely a great idea that I share, but I think this should go beyond: a complete software delivery infrastructure. The customer (software providers in fact) should be able to build, test and deploy applications….services for others users.

The great idea to relly on a source control system will solve the problem as versioning of the applications (for a part of it) and when you have multiple developpers working on an application or service. But this does not fullfil all the requirement for a PaaS, what about tests & validation, deployment (especially for multi-tenancy), delivery, maintenance…etc.

Finally, the requirement is to provide to some users a full featured development and delivery environment. The excellent post on the Lack of good Paas platform is highlighting very well all these requirements: customization and configurability, versioning and multitenancy, security, scallability.

I would add a requirement on robustness: as soon as multiple users can deliver software on top of platform shared by all…there is a high risk to have the system out of control. Ensuring a high level of service is fundamental, so the system should be really robust. The challenge is to let the system open (the sw providers are building software - so very high level of freedom) and “a live”, but this will be the topic of another post.