Rise above the Cloud hype with OpenShift by Eric D. Schabell.
From the post:
Are you tired of requesting a new development machine for your application? Are you sick of having to setup a new test environment for your application? Do you just want to focus on developing your application in peace without ‘dorking with the stack’ all of the time? We hear you. We have been there too. Have no fear, OpenShift is here!
In this article will walk you through the simple steps it takes to setup not one, not two, not three, but up to five new machines in the Cloud with OpenShift. You will have your applications deployed for development, testing or to present them to the world at large in minutes. No more messing around.
We start with an overview of what OpenShift is, where it comes from and how you can get the client tooling setup on your workstation. You will then be taken on a tour of the client tooling as it applies to the entry level of OpenShift, called Express. In minutes you will be off and back to focusing on your application development, deploying to test it in OpenShift Express. When finished you will just discard your test machine and move on. When you have mastered this, it will be time to ramp up into the next level with OpenShift Flex. This opens up your options a bit so you can do more with complex applications and deployments that might need a bit more fire power. After this you will be fully capable of ascending into the OpenShift Cloud when you chose, where you need it and at a moments notice. This is how development is supposed to be, development without stack distractions.
Specific to the Red Hat Cloud but that doesn’t trouble me if it doesn’t trouble you.
What is important is that like many cloud providers, the goal is to make software development in the cloud as free from “extra” concerns as possible.
Think of users who rely upon network based applications for word processing, spreadsheets, etc. Fewer of them would do so if every use of the application required steps that expose the network-based nature of the application. Users just want the application to work. (full stop)
A bit more of the curtain can be drawn back for developers but even there, the goal isn’t to master the intricacies of cloud computing but to produce robust applications that so happen to run on the cloud.
This is one small step towards a computing fabric where developers write and deploy software. (full stop) The details of where it is executed, where data is actually stored, being known only by computing fabric specialists. The application serves it users, produces the expected answers, delivers specified performance, what more do you need to know?
I would like to see topic maps playing a role in developing the transparency for the interconnected systems that grow into that fabric.
(I first saw this at DZone’s replication of the Java Code Geeks reposting at: http://www.dzone.com/links/r/rise_above_the_cloud_hype_with_openshift.html)