Book Review – Getting Started with OpenShift

After I bought Kindle Ebook reader, I got my reading habit back.

Started to read many Tamil books from FreeTamilEbooks.com and
Technical books.

Most of the English books are avaible in Epub, Mobi and PDF formats.

Recently, I downloaded the Ebook "Getting Started with OpenShift" for free
from the following site.

Books comes in epub,mobi and PDF format.

Thanks for the authors Steven Pousty and Katie J. Miller and O’Reilly for the nice book.

In the cloud computing, there are many AAS jargans.

PAAS, IAAS, SAAS, etc.

PAAS – Platform as a Service – Gives all the software development libraries/environment as service. –
Example – Google App Engine, OpenShift

No need to take care of OS. Manage only applications and libraries.

IAAS – Infrastructure as a Service – Gives all the operating systems as service. – Amazon Web Service, Google Cloud Platform.

You have to manage all the OS and packages, software installed.

SAAS – Software as a Service – Gives just software for use. – Gmail, Flickr, Facebook.

No need to manage anything. Just Use it.

Experts keep on adding "As a Service" for any tech jorgan.

Who knows? In Future we may hear words like Food as a service, Heart as a Service 🙂

This books introduces the AAS basics.

OpenShift is Redhat’s open source PAAS platform.
OpenShift Origin is Free Software and you can implement in your own environment,

They have the basics jargons – Gears, Cartridges.

Gear is a minimal shell environment with minimal RAM ( 512 MB), 1GB harddisk and with minimal CPU.

Catridge is the library/application/framework required for software development like Django, Ruby On Rails, PHP, Cron, Pear, Perl, Jboss etc.

Redhat gives 3 gears for free.

In their hosted paid plans, we can get more powerful and high storage gears.

Git is the basic version control system.
Once we set the gears and cartridges, we can start developing in our local system.

Once we push the code to the git master repo, the code is deployed on the redhat’s cloud.

We can add more cartridges like Jenkins for Continuous Integration and deployment.
There are many cartridges developed by the community.

Database servers can be managed by simple commands.

SSH login is provided for the gears.
But we can do most of the works within our local git repo.

Snapshots and backups of the gears are so easy.

Auto scaling is provided by default.

This book explores all the above said, with deploying a simple Python/Flask based web application.

The books gives a good overview of how the applications should be developed and deployed in the PAAS environments.

Rollout the OpenShift PAAS in your environment and provide the developers 100s of boxes for their development and testing.

Links to explore:

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