[lukebond]

paz documentation, presentations and (now out of date) website mention CD and environments a lot because it has always been a design goal of Paz to enable a CD workflow and give you quick and easy developer environments.

as it currently stands it's far from having achieved that. i ripped out the environments stuff before open-sourcing it because it was half-baked and hacky. expect these things to start coming back into paz in the coming months. what remains that's related to CD is really just that it can receive webhooks from the docker hub / quay.io so you can have a pipeline like git push -> webhook to CI server -> run tests -> docker build -> docker push -> webhook to paz for deployment.

as for orchestration and traditional PaaS functionality, i tend to agree with you and it's arguable whether or not Paz is actually a PaaS in the sense most people use that term. Paz is a platform that can run your services with a PaaS-like workflow. that's probably a more accurate way of putting it.

re "no special code", there is a little magic. paz creates a sidekick unit for your services that will announce them in Etcd. it uses Confd to watch for changes to announcements and reconfigures HAProxy under the hood. i need to document this :)