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Getting Started with OpenShift: A Guide for Impatient Beginners
Intrigued by the possibilities of developing web applications in the cloud? With this concise book, you get a quick hands-on introduction to OpenShift, the open source Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering from Red Hat. You’ll learn the steps necessary to build, deploy, and host a complete real-world application on OpenShift, without having to read long, detailed explanations of the technologies involved.
Though the book uses Python, application examples in other languages are available on GitHub. If you can build web applications, use a command line, and program in Java, Python, Ruby, Node.js, PHP, or Perl, you’re ready to get started.
Dive in and create your first example application with OpenShift Modify the example with your own code and hot-deploy the changes Add components such as a database, task scheduling, and monitoring Use external libraries and dependencies in your application Delve into networking, persistent storage, and backup options Explore ways to adapt your team processes to use OpenShift Learn OpenShift terms, technologies, and commands Get a list of resources to learn more about OpenShift and PaaS- GenresTechnology
126 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 13, 2014
6 people are currently reading
30 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 18, 2017
It may have been a good intro at the time of publishing, but now that the focus has shifted (in Openshift itself) toward containers (vs cartridges) I'm afraid it brings little value
May 26, 2020
INteresting; worth another reading soon to refresh concepts :)
May 4, 2022
Hey Folks, Steve here. This book is no longer relevant to current OpenShift. This was for OpenShift pre-Kubernetes. Nobody should be buying this book anymore.
September 19, 2015
Intrigued by the possibilities of developing web applications in the cloud? Absolutely yes! That’s why I’ve got my hands on this book. With the cloud being the de facto choice of most companies interested in deploying web applications and offering services, the number of IaaS and PaaS on the market increased exponentially in the past years. New competitors enter the scene. Some of them consolidate their position. Most mutate and evolve to face the fierce rivalry and adapt to new technologies (containers anyone?). When I first heard of OpenShift several questions immediately came up to my mind, mainly driven by the fact that the name is very close to OpenStack. After weeks asking myself what was it, resisting the temptation to check on Wikipedia, I have searched for a quick introductory text that could properly feed my hunger. Getting Started with Openshift was the right choice and I can happily say it has been a pleasure to dedicate it a couple of days’ commute to read it.
The authors make it very explicit when it’s time to define a target of this book: it is meant for people interested in a quick and concise introduction to OpenShift and its features. It’s not a long, detailed reference of each and every option available. A quick note must be added here: Getting Started with Openshift does indeed target beginners, but people new to OpenShift, not people with zero knowledge of the cloud. Any reader belonging to the latter category would probably end up scratching his head whenever some strange term (PaaS?) appears here and there.
With this being said, back to my very first question: What is OpenShift?. The book does not directly answer this, but anyone with some experience in the field rapidly get to the answer, as Openshift is slowly introduced: OpenShift is like Heroku: a PaaS. Plain and simple.
The book starts with a couple of introductory chapters. First, the three different OpenShifts flavors available are presented. On the contrary of Heroku, indeed, Red Hat allows anyone to get the whole code and take control of offering his own PaaS, which is an option mainly directed to the Enterprise. The free tier is the obvious choice of the authors. While very limited, indeed, it allows anyone to deploy some application without having to worry about the maintenance of the infrastructure powering it. The guys at Red Hat do the job for us. Next the reader is introduced to the concepts of gears and cartridges, which are exactly like what Heroku offers, with different names, of course.
Through the remaining eight chapters we are then introduced to magic world of OpenShift and its main features through a web application powered by Python Flask. As stated, this web application, whose code can be freely downloaded, is hosted on the free tier. The code per se is not hard to understand, but the authors obviously do not dive into it, so that sometimes, if the reader is not proficient with the technology, he ends up either googling or accepting what’s being used. We are interested in OpenShift, not Flask, after all.
As we move on towards the back cover, we are introduced to different types of cartridges: database, non database and third party. A little bit of continuous integration is also taken into the discussion, just to show the potential of the huge things that an enthusiast, or an enterprise, could deploy. The last part of the book does instead focus on disk usage and backup. These concepts are coupled with different strategies that can be used on OpenShift.
I must honestly say I was not expecting much from this book. In that sense I admit that I am overall happy with it, since not only it has answered my question(s), but it also made very clear the different features that OpenShift offers with a good example. I would definitely suggest it to anyone curious to find out what OpenShift is but uncertain whether to invest lots of money into huge books dedicated to it.
As usual, you can find more reviews on my personal blog: http://books.lostinmalloc.com. Feel free to pass by and share your thoughts!
The authors make it very explicit when it’s time to define a target of this book: it is meant for people interested in a quick and concise introduction to OpenShift and its features. It’s not a long, detailed reference of each and every option available. A quick note must be added here: Getting Started with Openshift does indeed target beginners, but people new to OpenShift, not people with zero knowledge of the cloud. Any reader belonging to the latter category would probably end up scratching his head whenever some strange term (PaaS?) appears here and there.
With this being said, back to my very first question: What is OpenShift?. The book does not directly answer this, but anyone with some experience in the field rapidly get to the answer, as Openshift is slowly introduced: OpenShift is like Heroku: a PaaS. Plain and simple.
The book starts with a couple of introductory chapters. First, the three different OpenShifts flavors available are presented. On the contrary of Heroku, indeed, Red Hat allows anyone to get the whole code and take control of offering his own PaaS, which is an option mainly directed to the Enterprise. The free tier is the obvious choice of the authors. While very limited, indeed, it allows anyone to deploy some application without having to worry about the maintenance of the infrastructure powering it. The guys at Red Hat do the job for us. Next the reader is introduced to the concepts of gears and cartridges, which are exactly like what Heroku offers, with different names, of course.
Through the remaining eight chapters we are then introduced to magic world of OpenShift and its main features through a web application powered by Python Flask. As stated, this web application, whose code can be freely downloaded, is hosted on the free tier. The code per se is not hard to understand, but the authors obviously do not dive into it, so that sometimes, if the reader is not proficient with the technology, he ends up either googling or accepting what’s being used. We are interested in OpenShift, not Flask, after all.
As we move on towards the back cover, we are introduced to different types of cartridges: database, non database and third party. A little bit of continuous integration is also taken into the discussion, just to show the potential of the huge things that an enthusiast, or an enterprise, could deploy. The last part of the book does instead focus on disk usage and backup. These concepts are coupled with different strategies that can be used on OpenShift.
I must honestly say I was not expecting much from this book. In that sense I admit that I am overall happy with it, since not only it has answered my question(s), but it also made very clear the different features that OpenShift offers with a good example. I would definitely suggest it to anyone curious to find out what OpenShift is but uncertain whether to invest lots of money into huge books dedicated to it.
As usual, you can find more reviews on my personal blog: http://books.lostinmalloc.com. Feel free to pass by and share your thoughts!
September 28, 2014
Five stars because the book does what it set out to do - i.e. provide an introduction to OpenShift - the up and coming PaaS. In fact, it packs a punch because it walks us through a full-blown application and discusses its complete lifecycle, from initiation to coding, deployment, backup, snapshots, and multiple deployment versions. I am a fan of hands-on books, and I really enjoyed following along with this one. Apart from some minor typos (basically missing 'rhc' at the beginning of some commands in the examples), it's a great quick-start.
Apart from the book and its style, when it comes to OpenShift itself, I am new to PaaS, so I can't compare OpenShift with some of its competitors, e.g. Heroku - but I really enjoyed the OpenShift user experience following through the examples, using my free three gears on the PaaS. If you're new to development in the cloud, it opens up your eyes to the myriad of possibilities waiting to be explored. I'll definitely start using OpenShift for my hobby projects now, and hopefully learn to develop some extensions/ custom cartridges for some the languages/ platforms missing from OpenShift, e.g. Scala, Rust, etc.
Apart from the book and its style, when it comes to OpenShift itself, I am new to PaaS, so I can't compare OpenShift with some of its competitors, e.g. Heroku - but I really enjoyed the OpenShift user experience following through the examples, using my free three gears on the PaaS. If you're new to development in the cloud, it opens up your eyes to the myriad of possibilities waiting to be explored. I'll definitely start using OpenShift for my hobby projects now, and hopefully learn to develop some extensions/ custom cartridges for some the languages/ platforms missing from OpenShift, e.g. Scala, Rust, etc.
July 11, 2016
Very quick and fast introduction to OpenShift. Get this book if you are interested in a quick overview, without understanding much of the details. The book goes through a simple app (front end + DB), but doesn't delve into anything much more complex that that.
As a quick intro I think it's a 4* book (as it's clearly stated on the book!). But if you are looking for something more in-depth, you'll need to get dive into OpenShift docs (which are not great) and online forums.
As a quick intro I think it's a 4* book (as it's clearly stated on the book!). But if you are looking for something more in-depth, you'll need to get dive into OpenShift docs (which are not great) and online forums.
March 8, 2015
Some of the examples are outdated or not working. See book errata.
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/errata...
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/errata...
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews