An IT nomad's diary

At the Press of a Button

Article from ADMIN 05/2011

By Thorsten Scherf

Red Hat's new OpenShift PaaS service takes an uncomplicated approach to sending web applications to the cloud.

Friday, 5pm: I just switched off my laptop a quarter of an hour ago and I am ready to go running, when my phone rings. Two friends from California are calling to proudly tell me about a new Perl web application they are writing. They would like to post the application for a public trial this weekend, but they don't have any free web space and ask if I can help them out.

This is a good opportunity to take OpenShift one step closer to the west coast of the United States, I think, and I forget about running to explain what OpenShift is all about.

OpenShift is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud service from Red Hat that supports various programming languages, frameworks, and databases. Access is organized by means of various levels. The entry level is known as Express and is freely accessible to any user. A command-line tool gives you the option of offering your own applications in a cloud environment. The supported programming languages in the Express variant are Ruby, PHP, and Perl. The back end is MySQL or SQLite. 128MB disk space and 256MB RAM are the available hardware resources in a shared-hosting environment.

If you need more, you have to upgrade to the Flex level, which means having an Amazon web service account. This level gives the user far more control over the environment, shell access, and the ability to serve up Java applications on a JBoss or Tomcat application server.

The highest level, Premium, is not currently available, but will be shortly. This level provides access to the cloud service provider's complete program. For example, you can serve up standalone programs without a web front end. It also offers a templating system to help scale virtual systems, and more programming languages are supported.

The Express level should be fine for my California colleagues and their Perl application, so I explain the steps necessary to get them started.

To begin, users need to register with the OpenShift website

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Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).