Abstract:The building industry in the world today is at large, far behind the rest of the world, technically. Alongside this, it is at threat of being dominated by a small selection of software vendors. These vendors push specific software solutions to the technically unskilled consumers in the AEC industry. The software they provide however is monolithic, native and heavy. Containers, distributed computing, and open source microservices and applications offer a solution to turn the construction industries future on its head. When computing is ubiquitous in our buildings with the internet of things, the whole way we think about building design has to change. We need to think in advance about how our applications which will run our buildings are developed. Each building is bespoke and the offers currently on the software market simply wont fit the bill in the near future. We are trying to develop a kubernetes based platform to lay the foundations for the future of lightweight bespoke apps developed for our built environment.
Outline:
- Introduction - An introduction to Jenca and Connor’s story in arriving at the current product offering and set of ideas, including kubernetes involvement.
- The Built Environment - A small history of the development of the AEC industries and their technological use and development. This history will describe the steps taken and the problems Jenca have uncovered. Problems include the amount and quality of existing building stock, and the number of buildings required to meet demand over the next century, and the lack of necessary knowledge and skill to engage with the new world.
- Microservices and web technologies - How the iterative, biomimetic steps that we see loosely in agile development and lean methodology help to evolve the best solution to these problems.
- Open sourcing and Kubernetes - The importance of Kubernetes in the role of delivering the Jenca solution and the vitality of open sourcing the product.
- Vision - Our long term vision, should the solution work as we hope.
