OpenShift is a free, auto-scaling platform-as-a-service for Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl and Python applications.
Developed by Red Hat, OpenShift aims to redefine the PaaS market by providing a new level of choice in languages, frameworks and clouds for developers to build, test, run and manage their applications. Building on Red Hat’s extensive expertise, OpenShift leads the PaaS market with innovative features extending the capabilities of PaaS to richer and more demanding applications.
Building on Red Hat’s open source leadership, OpenShift is designed to end the lock-in of PaaS, allowing users to choose the cloud provider upon which their application will run.
It delivers greater flexibility than any other PaaS, by supporting more development frameworks for Java, Python, PHP and Ruby, including Spring, Seam, Weld, CDI, Rails, Rack, Symfony, Zend Framework, Twisted, Django and Java EE. It includes both SQL and NoSQL data stores and a distributed file system. By building on the Deltacloud cloud interoperability standard, OpenShift is designed to allow developers to run their applications on any supported Red Hat Certified Public Cloud Provider, eliminating the lock-in associated with first-generation PaaS vendors.
Currently there are two application deployment services offered as part of OpenShift: Express & Flex.
TRY OpenShift Express for FREE!Express is a free, cloud-based application platform for Java, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby applications delivered in a shared-hosting model. With just a few commands you’ll be able to deploy your application to the cloud.
Sign up to TRY Flex!Flex is a browser-based platform-as-a-service for Java and PHP applications with auto-scaling, performance monitoring and application management capabilities built-in. You can provide your Amazon EC2 credentials in order to authorize OpenShift Flex to deploy cloud servers on your behalf OR take advantage of Red Hat’s free trial offer. The free trial includes 30 days or 30 hours (whichever comes first) of free cloud resources from Amazon EC2.
Over the coming weeks, we will be posting a series of tutorials to help you get started with OpenShift!
OpenShift might be robust and easy to manage, but as I’ve seen for Rack-based apps deploy, it provides few task customizations and is binded to Ruby 1.8 (so soon useless with Rails 4).