Applying Hospital Construction Practices to Cloud‑Native and DevOps: Lessons from the Huoshenshan and Leishenshan Hospitals

The Huoshenshan and Leishenshan hospitals were built extremely quickly by adopting an industrialized, prefabricated construction model (modular "box" buildings), which the authors identify as the key factor behind the speed of the projects.

Three possible hospital building approaches are discussed—converting a sports arena, converting a hotel, or constructing a new facility on a dedicated site—and the new‑site option is deemed the most suitable because it allows for strong isolation and reuse of existing design experience.

The article draws a direct analogy between hospital construction choices and software application selection, outlining three development paths: purchasing commercial SaaS solutions, extending open‑source projects, or fully custom‑developing software, each with its own trade‑offs in cost, flexibility, and required engineering capability.

It then links the modular, decoupled nature of the hospitals’ prefabricated structures to cloud‑native microservice architectures, emphasizing the importance of modularity and loose coupling in modern software systems.

Containers are presented as the software equivalent of the hospitals’ prefabricated “box” units, with Docker popularizing the technology and enabling standardized packaging, deployment, and scaling of applications.

The construction timeline of the hospitals mirrors the typical phases of building infrastructure—foundation, structural work, and finishing—paralleling the evolution of cloud computing services from IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS to newer models such as CaaS and FaaS.

Overall, the case study demonstrates how lessons from large‑scale, rapid construction projects can inform DevOps practices, cloud‑native design, and efficient delivery of software solutions.