In the previous post I’ve explained in short what OpenShift is about and how you can use it. In this post I’ll go a bit further in how to use the OpenShift origin framework in a private pass environment. I’ll do this by creating an application based on the “Do it yourself” cartridge. Read more
PaaS
In this post I’ll try to explain why everyone should start using OpenShift.
1. What it is?
The paas platform OpenShift is a free and opensource platform from RedHat. With free, meaning actually that you get 3 gears for free. On those nodes (see it as virtual servers), you can do almost everything you want. From running a JBoss Application server, up till a php application or do something with MongoDB.
The fact that it is open source makes it even more nice. You can simply download the paas platform and install it in your own small datacenter, taking advantage of all the features the online platform gives you. Simply clicking on the image below will bring you to the download page to install it in your own datacenter.
Xebia’s expertise with middleware and application deployment automation led to the wish to explore new tools handling these area’s.
Along came VMware’s Application Director 1.0 beta and later GA, and together with VMware Netherlands we built a demo environment at Xebia.
The setup did not go real smooth, mainly because we had some infra setup troubles and the interfacing between software components did not work directly.
After all was working, I compared the vApp director 1.0 with Xebialabs’ DeployIt deployment tool.
Conclusion: vApp director 1.0 is nice, but more operations/infra oriented than developer oriented. With DeployIt, when parts of the deployment (say, only a war & datasource) is changed between deployments, only those steps are done in correct order. With vApp dir, you have to script this out, or deploy everything from scratch, which takes a long time. On the other hand, DeployIt cannot create VM’s by itself.
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This is a true story of a company. At the first of January this year ago this company was a great idea and a few pictures. It had been like that for a while. At the first of April it was a company with a production website doing actual business with actual clients. The 12 weeks in between that have been awesome, nerve-wrecking and scary at the same time. We’ve had to let go of some really cool features and we’ve found out things about the business case that we definitely didn’t know when we said we could build it in such a short time. At the beginning of the project I invented the term “Oh shit erlebnis” and I’ve had a few since then.
Because we were working in short iterations (1 week Sprints), we had awesome focus and we could deal with most discrepancies between dreams and reality quickly.