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OpenShift by Red Hat

329 points| kragniz | 14 years ago |openshift.redhat.com

112 comments

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[+] 0xbadcafebee|14 years ago|reply
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.

  https://github.com/openshift/crankcase
  https://github.com/openshift/os-client-tools
  https://openshift.redhat.com/community/wiki/build-your-own
(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?)
[+] scottostler|14 years ago|reply
FWIW, heroku does. The first heroku slice for a project is free, with the caveat that it'll be spun down during periods of inactivity.

I imagine that most hobby users of heroku (say for a weekend hackathon) aren't paying anything.

[+] jvanenk|14 years ago|reply
last I checked, Heroku does have a free offering.
[+] bobsy|14 years ago|reply
I don't like this "Free" business.

It doesn't make sense and the complete lack of pricing info really puts me off.

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.

> We will keep this free plan for the foreseeable future. The free plan allows...

> 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.

These 2 statements make sense to me. The fact they mention nothing about pricing on their site confuses and annoys me.

[+] mhicks|14 years ago|reply
Not sure where the second statement came from but if you can let me know the source, I can correct it.

I can represent OpenShift fairly well. We will always have a free level of service and we are trying very hard to keep what is free today, free forever. We have tweaked a couple of things based on user feedback but the goal is to have a meaningful free offering.

At the same time, we are getting constant feedback that users want more than just the free offering. We also know that with pricing, they will want stability and predictability in pricing so we've spent a lot of time to get users involved and a lot of feedback in the pricing before we launch it. We want that pricing to be sustainable as well as valuable to users.

Hope this helps

[+] rplnt|14 years ago|reply
> So I play around with this, like it and choose to stick with it. They then introduce uncompetitive pricing.. I just wasted my time.

No, this is not Google AppEngine. The platform is opensourced. You can host this "cloud" on your own servers or rely on some 3rd party provider.

[+] adestefan|14 years ago|reply
I have a feeling Red Hat is going to try to make money off the private cloud businesses. Pitch OpenShift + support as an offering for companies to use internally. The free hosting that they're currently offering is just a way to get beta testers. Anything they make off of future plans would be icing on the cake.
[+] T-A|14 years ago|reply
From the ToS ( https://openshift.redhat.com/app/legal/site_terms ): "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"

That makes me a little nervous.

[+] azundo|14 years ago|reply
Here is the clause from the OpenShift Preview Services ToS (not the site terms): https://openshift.redhat.com/app/legal/services_agreement

3.3. Your License to Red Hat. You hereby grant to Red Hat a non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty free license to use Your trademarks, trade names and logos in connection with publicizing the Preview Services and communicating with analysts, customers or the press about the Preview Services. Your further grant to Red Hat, and any third party service provider on whose services Red Hat may depend to provide the Preview Services, a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to make, use, reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute, perform and display Content for the purpose of providing the Preview Services. Except as set forth in this Section, Red Hat obtains no rights in Content under this Agreement.

[+] eli|14 years ago|reply
Oy, not this again. I agree that could be written better, but it's not all that different from Heroku: "...you give Heroku a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such Application for the sole purpose of enabling Heroku to provide you with the Heroku Services."
[+] pja|14 years ago|reply
Those are the terms of use for the website, not the OpenShift service aren't they?
[+] brown9-2|14 years ago|reply
Isn't this standard boilerplate for ToS for these types of services? They need a "license" from you that covers deploying your software to as many servers as necessary, wherever in the world they host the platform.
[+] nosh|14 years ago|reply
If you're interested in checking out how to get mongo running on openshift, here are some things to get started

- Good list of resources: https://openshift.redhat.com/community/developers/mongodb

- Lots of goodies in here: https://github.com/openshift

- Part 1 of a 4-part series on building mobile apps with titanium, mongodb and openshift: http://blog.10gen.com/post/23089705899/mobilize-your-mongodb...

- Upcoming webinar on node.js and mongodb with OpenShift: http://www.10gen.com/events/building-web-services

Disclaimer: I work at 10gen

[+] ryancutter|14 years ago|reply
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.

However, be aware that not everything is enabled yet. I ran into problems when I discovered the multiprocessing package doesn't work (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=814991).

[+] jamesu|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] MatthewPhillips|14 years ago|reply
Dotcloud does it for me. I'd love to support RedHat though.
[+] edtechdev|14 years ago|reply
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.

Look forward to seeing more tutorials & code samples online and on their site. For example has anyone tried out meteor (w/node.js & mongodb) with it yet. Also, hopefully it will integrate with some of the browser-based IDEs out there like cloud9.

[+] ique|14 years ago|reply
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?
[+] wnm|14 years ago|reply
the preview is free and has a limit:

"The developer preview supports up to 3 gears per user. You have a quota of 40,000 files, 1GB of storage, and 512MB Memory per gear. It is free to use and you can run your application indefinitely. If you need to increase this quota, please mailto:[email protected] with your username, domain and Application URL."

from: https://openshift.redhat.com/community/faq/how-many-applicat...

[+] tikhonj|14 years ago|reply
I think they mean free as in speech more than free as in beer.

Of course, it is currently in a developer preview and so also free as in beer, but I think that's incidental--this is Red Hat after all; they actually care about users' freedom and they aren't afraid of offering paid plans and support.

Happily, since it's open source, you can just host it yourself if you aren't happy with Red Hat's potential future pricing.

[+] wmf|14 years ago|reply
The software is free for you to use to build your own cloud. If you're not a cloud provider you're still going to pay (for production at least).
[+] japhyr|14 years ago|reply
Has anyone chosen openshift over heroku for django? I didn't see any pricing info; is openshift still in beta?
[+] dabeeeenster|14 years ago|reply
No mention of pricing anywhere on their site. What?
[+] r080|14 years ago|reply
FAQ has something: "To get more information on the pricing and timing of a paid version of OpenShift please send an email to [email protected]"
[+] rplnt|14 years ago|reply
It's in some sort of beta and only limited free tier is available. You can still get it running on your server(s) though.
[+] amalag|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] TheSteve0|14 years ago|reply
Our roadmap has more support for newer versions of Ruby coming soon. We started with the base packages in RHEL but are now working to also bring newer versions as standard cartridges. That said, you can also use a DIY cartridge to get Ruby 1.9.x
[+] jwarzech|14 years ago|reply
Thank you for posting your experience trying it with rails, I agree deployment of a non-trivial app to heroku can be a pain the first time but once you get everything working its a breeze for subsequent deployments.
[+] gary4gar|14 years ago|reply
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
[+] geuis|14 years ago|reply
The documentation is frankly awful. For example, when getting the status:

rhc domain status -l <myemailhere> 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.

In looking at the User Guide, I find it gets me no where. http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/OpenShift/2.0/html/User_Gu...

The relevant message here is:

"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."

Nothing like a circular reference that leads to nowhere.

[+] TheSteve0|14 years ago|reply
You probably created your domain and application through the web interface. This is an issue we are working through now - sorry we haven't gotten to it yet - it will be fixed in the next couple of sprints. The problem is that your SSH env has not been set up to work with the RHC tools yet. They expect a configure file in the .ssh directory to specify which key talks to the *.rhcloud.com domain. This KB article may help you get started: https://openshift.redhat.com/community/kb/kb-e1034-ssh-facts... Again, my apologies and we are actively working on that story right now.
[+] diminish|14 years ago|reply
Do we have any major computing player remaining without an app cloud offering or plan?
[+] Kudos|14 years ago|reply
Apple?
[+] nivertech|14 years ago|reply
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?
[+] shykes|14 years ago|reply
dotCloud's cli is written in Python. In the long run I don't think it matters which language it's written in - as long as it's easy to install on every computer.
[+] Ryan_Shmotkin|14 years ago|reply
Tsk tsk.. ruby 1.8.7 by default
[+] ctrlaltesc|14 years ago|reply
Interesting that the install instructions for Red Hat Linux distributions is far more complicated than that of other Linux distributions.

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?

[+] Wickk|14 years ago|reply
Are we talking content abuse? It's in their ToS if we are. Not entirely sure how effective they're going to be at monitoring malicious content, but it's there.