OpenShift by Red Hat

If you don't like the idea of relying on RedHat to play with this tech, remember that it is Open Source. Download it, use it, heck make a business that builds on it.<p><pre><code> https://github.com/openshift/crankcase https://github.com/openshift/os-client-tools https://openshift.redhat.com/community/wiki/build-your-own </code></pre> (I will say though: they make it extremely easy to get started and I really like using OpenShift so far. I've never used Heroku, but if it's this user friendly i'd definitely have used it before... Why don't they have a free offering for people to test out the service?)

I don't like this "Free" business.<p>It doesn't make sense and the complete lack of pricing info really puts me off.<p>So I play around with this, like it and choose to stick with it. They then introduce uncompetitive pricing.. I just wasted my time. They do not need to give exact pricing - they might not know at the moment - but they should at least give an overview of what they plan to do.<p>&#62; We will keep this free plan for the foreseeable future. The free plan allows...<p>&#62; This free plan will exist while we develop and test the service. As the service becomes stable we will be introducing paid plans and you will be asked to upgrade.<p>These 2 statements make sense to me. The fact they mention nothing about pricing on their site confuses and annoys me.

From the ToS ( <a href="https://openshift.redhat.com/app/legal/site_terms" rel="nofollow">https://openshift.redhat.com/app/legal/site_terms</a> ): "you give Red Hat a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through the web site"<p>That makes me a little nervous.

I tried the service a couple of months ago and it is really easy to use. Got a blog up and running in no time just to test the waters using bottle, jinja and mongo. No sweat.<p><a href="http://blog-georgenava.rhcloud.com" rel="nofollow">http://blog-georgenava.rhcloud.com</a>

If you're interested in checking out how to get mongo running on openshift, here are some things to get started<p>- Good list of resources: <a href="https://openshift.redhat.com/community/developers/mongodb" rel="nofollow">https://openshift.redhat.com/community/developers/mongodb</a><p>- Lots of goodies in here: <a href="https://github.com/openshift" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/openshift</a><p>- Part 1 of a 4-part series on building mobile apps with titanium, mongodb and openshift: <a href="http://blog.10gen.com/post/23089705899/mobilize-your-mongodb-building-mongodb-mobile-apps" rel="nofollow">http://blog.10gen.com/post/23089705899/mobilize-your-mongodb...</a><p>- Upcoming webinar on node.js and mongodb with OpenShift: <a href="http://www.10gen.com/events/building-web-services" rel="nofollow">http://www.10gen.com/events/building-web-services</a><p>Disclaimer: I work at 10gen

I wrote a Python web app on OpenShift (Tornado not Django) and really liked it. While I don't have experience with Heroku, I was really impressed with OpenShift.<p>However, be aware that not everything is enabled yet. I ran into problems when I discovered the multiprocessing package doesn't work (<a href="https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=814991" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=814991</a>).

I have yet to find a service as straightforward as Heroku. Cloudfront comes close... but i get the feeling especially when looking at the documentation that Heroku have really put in a lot of effort into making a simple to use application platform.

Yeah I'm excited about it and it's getting me to finally take the step from traditional web app development (vps, php, etc.) to more easily scalable app development - and it's all open source, no vendor lock-in, and hopefully affordable pricing in the future.<p>Look forward to seeing more tutorials &#38; code samples online and on their site. For example has anyone tried out meteor (w/node.js &#38; mongodb) with it yet. Also, hopefully it will integrate with some of the browser-based IDEs out there like cloud9.

How can this be free? If I host a massive application here, will they shut it down or rate limit or how can this work?

Has anyone chosen openshift over heroku for django? I didn't see any pricing info; is openshift still in beta?

No mention of pricing anywhere on their site. What?

Very interesting, though documentation doesn't seem to be very comprehensive yet.<p>There is little information about process management, like <a href="https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/process-model" rel="nofollow">https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/process-model</a><p>Not to mention how to create custom Cartridges, like you can do with Heroku buildpacks: <a href="https://gist.github.com/fe7f04abbd9538b656c5" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/fe7f04abbd9538b656c5</a>

Couldn't get their client software to work on Ubuntu. Even followed a few tutorials. I think I'm missing something, but haven't a bunch of time to invest.

I tried openshift a few months ago for Rails. A real pain in the butt. They dont have simple deploy like Heroku. Even heroku can be time consuming in the beginning to get right, openshift was even more complicated. It may work better for Java I don't know, looks like they are right on the bleeding edge with support for Ruby 1.8.7.

the rubyist in me is happy to report that openshift is written largely in ruby. so all ruby programmers should try running openshift in their own machinea

The documentation is frankly awful. For example, when getting the status:<p>rhc domain status -l &#60;myemailhere&#62; I get an error about ~/.ssh/config not existing. I added my ssh key via the web interface and have no idea what's going on here.<p>In looking at the User Guide, I find it gets me no where. <a href="http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/OpenShift/2.0/html/User_Guide/chap-User_Guide-OpenShift_Web_Interface.html#sect-User_Guide-Configuring_Your_Local_Machine" rel="nofollow">http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/OpenShift/2.0/html/User_Gu...</a><p>The relevant message here is:<p>"If your system fails any of the tests, make a note of the error message and consult the relevant section of the OpenShift User Guide for further information."<p>Nothing like a circular reference that leads to nowhere.

Do we have any major computing player remaining without an app cloud offering or plan?

Why all PaaS providers (Heroku, CF, OpenShift) building their CLI tools using Ruby? Are they copying Heroku? Maybe because Python used for OS itself? What dotCloud uses?

Tsk tsk.. ruby 1.8.7 by default

Interesting that the install instructions for Red Hat Linux distributions is far more complicated than that of other Linux distributions.<p>But seriously, if they are offering a free platform to anyone with an email address then what sort of precautions are they taking to prevent abuse?

I wish they'd list pricing in the event you grow beyond the free plan. Reluctant to even bother trying without knowing that type of information.

just a quick compliment to RH; loving how the employees are giving constructive feedback on the comments here :)

How does it compare to CloudFoundry? Aside from having official PHP support, that is.

I'm generally a fan of RedHat, but not having details on the most important point of OpenShift that will decide whether it will fail or succeed in the market (i.e. the price) is a scummy play - that I only expected from enterprises. I hope these "enterprise marketing" tactics aren't a trend for RedHat.

If you're not paying, you're the product.

This is cool!

I made a mental typo when reading the name and omitted the "f."