Use OpenShift by Red Hat to answer productivity pressure from the Business

Take a moment a think about steps that are needed in your organization for new project to get started.

Depending on size of your organization steps includes request forms, filling spreadsheets, typing word documents and maybe contacting 3^rd parties for hardware and IT support request. All steps include hours, days or even weeks of waiting and steps usually have to be repeated for different environments and multiple times on production due scaling.

All projects should following steps:

1. Have idea for new product or service
2. Get some money to implement the idea
3. Code
4. Test
5. Launch
6. Scale

Everything else that is not mentioned above takes extra time and money. Those are always off from actual project implementation.  Scrum projects often have sprint 0 for this everything else. Sometimes customer is paying the costs, but usually it is taken off from project revenue and also off from time to market.

Closer to markets or customer you are, more efficient and quick you need to be. In tough competition there is no time to wait few days for IT department to setup development environment, production environment or scale production. IT and service development is under huge pressure from the business to enable growth. To increase productivity organization needs to standardize and automate development processes and tools. Unfortunately no one usually has time to do this. Because of lack of time standardization and automation fade out to only buzz words that are introduced at the start of each project.

You can try to tackle above issues with IaaS (Infratructure as a Service) or SaaS (Software as a Service). When your organization tries to benefit from IaaS using virtualization and cloud computing it still leaves huge amount of work before project can get started. You just don’t have to order bare metal servers. At the other end SaaS is a great choice if service provides can offer application that meets your needs 100%. At some point you have to do some custom applications and then you must face problems and pain to get project and environments up and running.

Do you actually have to face those problems? No you don’t and you shouldn’t have to!

Red Hat introduces OpenShift by Red Hat PaaS (Platform as a Service) product that gives organizations possibility to focus four main key steps in service development; code, test, launch and scale. OpenShift doesn’t give you ideas or money, those you have to figure out yourself. PaaS is an application platform that runs on top of IaaS and hosts SaaS applications.

OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications. OpenShift takes care of all the infrastructure, middleware, and management and allows the developer to focus on what they do best: designing and coding applications. OpenShift standardizes and automates your application development environment and also huge part of development processes.

Picture 1: Idea of OpenShift; code, deploy/test and launch

OpenShift takes away all system administration details like installing servers, setting up runtimes, libraries and frameworks and configuration of test and build tools. You use tools provided by Red Hat and setup up your application and start coding.

Here is an example how easy it is to create and deploy application to OpenShift. I’m using Red Hat’s Kitchensink quickstart application in this example and I have OpenShift tools already installed.

1. Create application

rhc app create -a kitchensink -t jbossas-7

2. Go to project directory

cd kitchensink

3. Get quickstart code from GitHub

git remote add upstream -m master git://github.com/openshift/kitchensink-example.git

git pull -s recursive -X theirs upstream master

4. Push/Deploy code to OpenShift server

git push

5. Test the application

http://kitchensink-cctah.rhcloud.com

Example is a bit technical but it should give you an idea how easy and strait forward it is to use OpenShift. Example uses JBoss AS 7 as middleware platform and JavaEE as application framework.

Git distributed revision control and source code management system is critical part of each OpenShift application. It is used as projects source code repository and at the same time as a transport mechanism from developers to OpenShift. Because of Git OpenShift can be used as a platform for development teams and not only to single developers.

Even Red Hat is very well known their JBoss JavaEE product family OpenShift is not dedicated to JavaEE development. You can use several different languages, Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, Node.js, Java or customize your our own. After selecting language you can still select frameworks like Spring or Rails. Developers can use tools that they like and which are most suitable for projects in hand.

Programming language and platforms are not all that OpenShift offers. It offers building tools like Maven, several different persistence storages like MySQL or MongoDB and also management tools for those. And it also offers full-featured CMS systems like Drupal or WordPress. All these are out-of-box without any tuning and configurations. If those are not enough you can always expand OpenShift with your own components or cartridges in OpenShift terms.

Figure 2: Developers choose language, frameworks and middleware

OpenShift is built on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that makes OpenShift production ready. It is stable, response, performant and secure. You can use OpenShift in all software development phases from development environment to automatically scaling production.

OpenShift by Red Hat is based on community project called OpenShift Origin that you can just download and start using. It doesn’t cost anything, but you have only community support. From OpenShift Origin Red Hat has bundled, tested and verified OpenShift Enterprise that is not free, but it has Red Hat’s support. You can setup and run OpenShift Enterprise inside your organization or let Red Hat partners to host and support it for you. Red Hat also provides OpenShift Online that is running on Amazon EC2 (region US). In there you can get started easily for free. Just go to www.openshift.com, create an account, sign in and enjoy.