It's getting 'Cloud'-y over here

Tomorrow I start in a new position at Red Hat, Inc. After 4.5+ years in IT, I will be joining the Openshift Ops team in Engineering.

What's Openshift? Simply put it is an implementation of PaaS (Platform as a Service). Currently there are two solutions being offered by Red Hat:

Express: "A free, shared, cloud-based application platform for Java, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby applications. It's super-simple—your development environment is also your deployment environment: git push"

Flex: A dedicated solution that gives you "more control over your apps, or move your existing applications to the cloud with ease! Flex is a dedicated cloud solution that provides everything you need to easily scale, provision, deploy, and monitor your applications."

I have written a couple of application and deployed them on Openshift.

The first one is a PHP based application that interfaces with the flickr API, and allows you to search for users on flickr while displaying their most popular photos: http://f-bean2.rhcloud.com.

The second one is Ruby based, and it basically uses Google's gdata API to talk to YouTube and display my family's playlist in a customized way: http://videos.the-silvas.com (http://y-bean2.rhcloud.com).

Other Reading:

Deploying Jboss AS 7 to Openshift Tutorial: http://jaitechwriteups.blogspot.com/2011/08/deploy-java-ee-application-on-openshift.html