When you walk into your garage and see your water heater’s sprung a leak, as I did the other day, is your first thought “Argh; how much is this going to cost?”, or “Wow, what a great metaphor, right here in my house!” Yeah, I went with “cost” first, but let’s run with the metaphor.
I know my way around putting in a sink, or a faucet, or a garbage disposal. All the client-side bits, if you will. But everything I read confirmed my suspicions about water heaters: Your family wants to stop taking cold showers. Don’t mess around. Go with someone who really knows the infrastructure.
Gas-driven… or PaaS-driven?
If you’re building and deploying software, you want to get out of “cold shower” mode as quickly as possible. The less time you spend working on the infrastructure, the more time you have to do the stuff that’s fun and profitable. If you’re worrying about the equivalent of water heaters, you’re not going to be moving forward quickly enough, and that can be deadly in today’s competitive world.
You’ve got to get out of the garage.
That’s why I’ve been enjoying the heck out of OpenShift.
PaaS, CaaS, and You
If you’ve been keeping up on industry news, you may already know that at this year’s Red Hat Summit, the spotlight was on the significant advances in what they’ve been doing with PaaS and containers. OpenShift is their family of PaaS solutions, from private to hybrid to cloud, but it’s more than that, as it integrates container-forward leading-edge technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes, with the advanced tools Red Hat has developed to manage and simplify the interactions between the various components.
Just as importantly: while you’re heads-down, creating the services that give you and your team a competitive edge, the same thing’s happening with the underlying platform, which is evolving and becoming more innovative, too. And because it’s all based on open source, and open standards, and a “virtuous circle” of Red Hat expertise and community feedback, not only have you eliminated a ton of risk and complexity, you’ve also acquired flexibility and “future proofing”. Your underlying platform is going to be agile, which in turn is going to let you be agile.
Jump On In; The Water’s Fine!
The good news is: you can get started even faster than I got our hot showers back. I did my own OpenShift tire-kicking by way of the free book OpenShift for Developers: A Guide for Impatient Beginners (Impatient? Hey, that’s me!), which takes you quickly and easily through the steps to create your own private cloud playground. (And by the way, OpenShift is designed to let you move your apps smoothly and painlessly from on-premises to hybrid to public cloud deployments, but that’s a topic for another metaphor and another time.)
There’s also the Red Hat Container Development Kit, and a range of other cloud technologies for you to bring into play, including storage and unified management.
If you’ve been spending too much time plugging leaks and not enough time building the apps that matter to your constituents, you’ve now got an easy way to streamline and simplify your world. Why not get started today?