Eric D. Schabell

Ratheesh Pisharody wrote:Dear Eric,

Thanks a lot for the detailed reply. Was very helpful.
Wishing you success with the book.

NOTE: Just created the account at openshift, thinking about getting started soon.

Ratheesh

You will enjoy it! ;)

Mat Anthony wrote:Hi Eric,
whats the performance like using openshift?. I have a CRUD web application developed using spring, hibernate and jsf. Could openshift be used for a live production application that has many users?

Mat

For the free version of OpenShift you get 3 gears, should you choose to apply them to your single application they give you the following as stated on the OpenShift site https://www.openshift.com/blogs/openshift-delivers-more-free-memory-and-storage-for-your-applications:

Posted April 24th, "As of today, when you sign up for OpenShift you'll get access to a total of 1.5 GB of memory and 3 GB of storage, for FREE! Which also means more memory and storage per app. These 1.5 GBs of memory are distributed across three cloud computing units that in OpenShift parlance we call "Gears"; which means that in our free tier you get three Gears with 500MB of memory and 1GB storage each. OpenShift can assign these three Gears to a single app and its Cartridges (Cron, MySQL, etc.) or you can use each Gear for a separate application."

That should give you an idea what you can expect for free, imagine if you need more what you can achieve by going paid? ;)

Costs outlined here: https://www.openshift.com/faq/are-there-different-gear-sizes-and-how-much-do-they-cost

Ratheesh Pisharody wrote:Dear Eric,

First of all congratulations on the book itself and thanks for the opportunity provided to us for winning it.

Having worked always on Enterprise Solutions and having infrastructure taken care for me within walls of the company I work in (so obviously not experienced with the cloud), my question is:

Could you please provide:
a) What are the alternatives/competition to OpenShift
b) What advantages/disadvantages (if any) does OpenShift bring to the table?

Question on the book itself:
a) What was the motivation to write this book?

Hi,

You are very welcome, good luck with winning a copy, it is worth it for you to get started on OpenShift.

I come from the same background, working for enterprises and used to having to request resources for my projects. This way of working that I cover in my book is a revelation. Trust me, it changes the game. Privately you can work with OpenShift anywhere that you have a connection. Within your work you will start seeing changes over the coming years that companies are starting to enable their resources as a pool, not as individual machines. This is what Red Hat refers to as 'hybrid open cloud', using existing resources in an enterprise along with public external resources for scaling out if needed.

The OpenShift concept is a way of working that abstracts a lot of the resource problems out of the developers control. Perfect, now you can concentrate on your development! Give it a spin, you will not regret it.

Ok, the questions:

1. alternatives abound, as listed by Mohamad.

2. advantages are the single way of working, focusing on your development and no longer having to mess around with the development stack. Disadvantages, for some, that you no longer get to mess with the stack, that you will have to produce more development progress in your projects and that you are doing what you were hired to do!

3. my motivation to write this book were based on how I work within the IT. I believe you need to teach. In my job I have the chance to speak and write a lot on the various topics around OpenShift and JBoss Integration products. I was so fascinated by OpenShift, how easy, straight forward, and effective it was. I had to dig in deeper, I started blogging about it, speaking about it, and that sort of rolled into the OpenShift Primer after about eight months. It was a very easy book to write!

Hope you win a copy, but if not, it is not very expensive. ;)

Get going and hop on over to http://openshift.redhat.com to give it a try!

Vic Hood wrote:How effective is the gear addition /removal mechanism of OpenShift? I am looking to create a mini web based application , but dont really know my consumer base yet. So will Openshift scale up/down automatically?

The scaling feature when applied scales for web traffic, it does not scale for memory consumption. Good to know based on a java application being hosted or a web application. If you need scaling for web application (traffic) then it will keep adding gears as needed up to your limit and back down as needed when traffic subsides. If you are using the free version, you get 3 gears to scale with, assuming you have not used any for another application/instance of OpenShift.

-- erics

Take a look at Openshift, you can find the quickstart guides and get going for free with up to 3 gears (3 instances): https://www.openshift.com

See the Get Started link. The most work you will have to do is to sign up (regiser)! ;)

-- erics

Thanks! ;)

Jeanne Boyarsky wrote:Welcome Eric!