Test Driving Red Hat OpenShift Flex

OpenShift is a new new platform-as-a-service offering by Red-Hat announced on May 4th.

OpenShift will be available in Express, Flex and Power modes. The Express and Flex offerings were made availability in developer preview and the Power option is coming soon.

The new platform is aimed for Java, Ruby, PHP, and Python applications, and has support for the MySQL and MongoDB databases.

OpenShift express offers free hosting while OpenShift Flex offers a greater degree of control and choice over the middleware components with built-in versioning, monitoring and auto scaling.
The OpenShift platform is based on code by Makara (a cloud start-up company acquired by Red-Hat in 2010) plus some RHEL isolation features, the JBoss EE runtime and some other components.
For now OpenShift is not open-sourced, but Red-Hat has promised to make the code available.

I decided to give the OpenShift Flex version a try.

In order to try OpenShift you have to register as a new user. After you a registered and logged in you can start using the Flex Console.
At the beginning you will have to follow a few initial setup steps including setting up a cloud provider (currently only Amazon EC2) , creating a cluster of servers and deploying a sample application. Notice that you need an active Amazon EC2 account and you will be required to provide your account access keys (can be found in the AWS management console).

The first 3 steps are part of an 8 steps self guided tour to OpenShift. You can come back to this guide whenever you want.

The Flex console is, surprisingly, a Flex based graphical user interface for provisioning cloud resources, governing the size and location of your cloud servers and managing the lifecycle of your cloud deployed applications.

The console is designed as a portal with a tab panel containing all major functionality of the console. The major areas of the console are:

The "INTRO" tab allows your to take the self guided tour and provides links to some how-to guides (PDF format).

The "CLOUDS" tab allows you to manage the cloud accounts which are used for hosting your applications.

Once you have a cloud account setup you can move on to the "CLUSTERS" tab for creating a cluster of servers and defining basic cluster characteristics such as number of servers, number of cores, memory and disk space and more advanced ones related to auto scaling. Additionaly this area contains functionality for importing/exporting database and setting email preferences.
Creating a new cluster will result with creating cloud servers and installing necessary software one them.

The "SERVERS" tab view information about the cloud servers in your cluster including basic resource utilization statistics. It also allows you to join/unjoin servers to a cluster.

Applications are added and managed in the "APPLICATIONS" tab. At this area you can control various aspects of the application lifecycle from build to deployment, view the application files, configure it and allocate various software components (JDK, web server, app server, database, cache and more). It is also possible to view various changes made to the application files, diff them with previous versions and deploy them to production.

The "PERFORMANCE" tab is used for performance monitoring and contains a lot of nicely displayed visual information about the performance of various components of the application from the underlying server to the application code.

Additionally there are tabs for viewing various logs and events.

My first experience with the console is OK, a little buggy and the UI still needs improvement, especially when some actions takes time and you do not get visual indication, while are actions leaves you stuck with a rotating clock indicator which never disappears. I also encountered some connectivity and stability issues, but after all this is only a developers preview version for now.

Next steps will be to test the more interesting features provided by OpenShift such as auto scaling and deploying my own applications on it (not the samples provided by Red-Hat).

At next posts I will dive deeper into the various functionality provided by OpenShift and my personal experience with it.