No Longer Running on OpenShift

If you've been following my blog very closely you might notice it's been up and down occasionally over the past couple of weeks. You may also notice that I mentioned Drupal "fun" in my previous post. This was maybe a bit misleading as it wasn't really Drupal's fault, but Drupal did make it much easier to deal with.

What did not make it easy was the OpenShift Online v2 to v3 migration. Or more accurately non-migration. Unfortunately it turns out that OSO v3 is a big old step back in the usability category, at least for a small user like myself. Yes, there is an OpenShift Drupal site, but as of this writing the only actual mention of Drupal is in the title. It's basically keyword spam because trying to migrate my Drupal site from v2 pretty much failed utterly.

Now, it should be noted that I was a complete freeloader who used OpenShift Online for years without paying a penny. And v3 makes it pretty clear they don't want people like me anymore. Which is fair enough, I guess. At the free tier you now get enforced 25% downtime per 3 day period, which for a blog that has fairly constant traffic is kind of a dealbreaker. You also get a really ugly URL to your app and the free tier doesn't support custom domains, so that sucks too.

But hey, maybe it's time for me to start paying for the service. Heck, it's all work-related anyway so I can probably expense it. Oh wait, the cheapest paid option is $50. Per month. Yeah, I'm not going to get away with expensing that.

So not only was it not possible to migrate my application in the way they documented, even if I succeeded in doing so I was going to be left with either a terrible user experience or a very large monthly bill. It seems v3 was OpenShift's way of telling users like myself to go away. Which I did. And maybe they won't miss me. After all, I never paid for their service.

But what I did was evangelize it. Not that long ago I was telling people at a conference how much I liked OpenShift and how it was doing things the right way. It was easy to get started and you could scale up as needed. Now it's not easy to get started and the scaling ramp is more like a very large step. I won't be recommending that anyone use OpenShift from now on.

I do hope they get this sorted out because I think it reflects very poorly on Red Hat that we've made this migration fall somewhere in between painful and impossible. But at this point I'm probably done with OpenShift for at least a few years, so it doesn't matter that much to me.

Footnote: On the Drupal front, I was fortunately able to migrate my site to run on another server where I had a different Drupal-based site already. The easy multi-site capability is fantastic. It's ridiculously simple to run multiple domains off a single IP. And now when there's a security update that needs applying I only have one server to deal with. As unhappy as I was with OpenShift through this whole process, Drupal was fantastic. So that's my little ray of sunshine in this mostly doom and gloom post. :-)