Exploring Openshift
Time to jump openshift bandwagon, start using PaaS (platform as a service) and join Cloud. Why do I need it and what is Openshift?
My expertise area is JEE development, and I try to keep myself updated with the latest technologies by "getting my hands dirty" in coding. Some time ago, I implemented my own JEE based blogging implementation and decided to host it on resin and then followed by JBoss AS 7. The next step was to get a good, reliable and cheap JBoss hosting. I manage to get a cheap "VPS" host (around 10$/month), however, I wasn't happy with it. Too unreliable, too slow, much lesser resources. And I have to manage everything by hand, monitor JBoss, monitor my HSQLDB etc. Even though its raw power to control things as you please, but it gets too time consuming pretty soon.
Openshift comes to the rescue.
From offering perspective, at the moment, they provide free of cost developer preview (and I hope this will remain as it is). For a low volume site like mine, this was perfect. It provides me a ground to test with the latest and greatest technologies at no fraction of cost.
From technology perspective, I was able to setup one instance of JBoss AS 7 and PostgreSQL 8.4 within minutes, ready to push my changes via git. The main time spent was converting my blog data from hsqldb to PostgreSQL. Openshift provide hooks and access to manage all it with ease - a developer's dream. Pretty neat.
Now the scalability, assuming that my site becomes very popular, I can add another JBoss instance to scale my load (same goes for PostgreSQL instance), this is the true beauty of "PaaS".
So there you go, get yourself an Openshift account and start experimenting. Stay tuned for my further Openshift experiments :)