OpenShift

Being able to deploy an app with a simple Git push command is awesome. So much red tape and admin tasks can be cut right out making this a very comprehensive, useful, practical, affordable cloud based platform as a service. There is a free forever plan which you can use to do some testing though you must be okay with some idle time delays. The paid accounts seem very reasonably priced coming in well under a penny per hour to get started working the way up to a penny per hour for large projects which need more memory and performance. This is very good considering you are only paying for exactly what you need. You have a variety of coding languages and frameworks to choose from which is cool including PHP, Ruby, Node.js and you can build a content management system with an automatic installer such as Wordpress or Drupal. There are quite a lot of cartridges available which are pre-made and ready for you to implement in your app instance. This is a huge time saver having this much done for you upfront but you can create custom apps as well if you're savvy, no problem. The cartridges range from databases to management tools, caching service as well as monitoring and continuous integration but that's just some of what's possible. There's MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Perl, MySQL, Python, Cron and a whole lot more you may be familiar with to utilize pretty much within a few minutes of logging in. I like that you can utilize Git to store your source code in a version control repository, it's incredibly helpful to have this build in. There are a number of tools and scripts in your account which help improve your overall workflow efficiency and productivity such as command line scripts for automation and an integrated intelligent design environment which is great. I haven't even touched on the JBoss Developer Studio capabilities are great and allow you to build the actual application via Eclipse as well as enterprise level transactional apps which integrate fully in OpenShift. And you can deploy them once complete in a click which is pretty slick.

It's too bad there is idle downtime on the free accounts it would be great to test with fully functional app consistently in order to capture accurate data. The downtime means people will not utilize the app if it takes longer than three to five seconds to load. Which it would when it is idling and needs to wake up so to speak for each user. So while it's helpful for testing every other aspect of OpenShift the final test is live with your paid account.

OpenShift is a cloud based platform as a service which helps you to develop and deploy various mobile and web apps both front-end and back-end along with architecture which is service orientated, along with the integration of your current software as a service so it's an incredibly versatile option. Having it secured with Git protocol is good and ensures you're secured, but is also fast with a lot of control of your source code and versioning. You have complete control for example of your entire development lifecycle in that you can move through dev, QA, pre-production to production and fully deployment within your centralized account. While there is a good amount of documentation and support available especially in that it is open source. You often find the open source culture very friendly and helpful in my experience. So if you're stuck get some help it's quick and easy because I believe you will be very happy overall with your choice to use OpenShift to create and deploy apps long term.