It goes by many names: Cloud, Platform as a Service, Computing Platform. It comes down to this: give developers the right interfaces to their operations to make them as productive as possible -- and all the while keep everything running smoothly.

Whatever you call it, it lets developers build better software, in less time at lower cost.

In this presentation Garrett will present a history of building an application platform at CloudBees, diving into important architectural and technical details along the way. He'll cover topics such as inter-node communication, monitoring and alerting, recovery strategy, and interface design.

Specific technologies covered will include AMQP, 0MQ, Erlang, Python, MySQL, Riak, and genapp (CloudBees' open source deployment framework).

Talk objectives: Whether you're a PaaS vendor, a devops hacker, or a system administrator, your mission is to help developers be more productive by removing barriers to deploying and running applications. This talk will articulate important facets of platform development and share practical experience from the field.

Target audience: Anyone interested in cloud architectures, devops, or just good old fashioned war stories.