Most of us have been through this. You have to put up a demo for a customer, a conference or just to show something to a person living far away. Now assuming the other person is not on the corporate network, you have to look for a server that is hosted in the public.
Forget getting a computer outside your corporate DMZ. You have to go through many hurdles. All the corporate security stuff come into play. We cannot blame anybody for being so paranoid, given the state of the world.
Everybody is getting hacked these days. Now, the irony is that the demos may be a representation of some tech that is not critical from security perspective but has value when displayed to a viewer. That is why it is called a
DEMO.
You may say, there is Amazon EC2. Well, that's cool. I have used EC2 for some quick demos. But I have always had to stay on top of my toes because I would need to shut down the instances, once the job was done. The reason was that the credit card meter would be running (just like a long distance taxi meter).
A couple of years ago, I did write some simple web apps on Google App Engine. They are probably still running. Wow,
Platform-as-a-service. You write apps and don't have to worry about dev-ops, cap-ex,op-ex etc. Certainly for simple apps, your credit card meter is not running.
The challenge with GAE was the restrictive API that you had to program against. It was a pain to code to a whitelisted api.
Enter OpenShift, a PaaS from Red Hat. I have been running many demos on it for months. A cheatsheet I have is https://community.jboss.org/wiki/CheatSheetForPicketLinkOnRedHatOpenShift
Why do I like
OpenShift Express Paas?
- It's free.
- It allows me to deploy standard Java EE web apps in minutes.
- I do not have to worry about server administration.
- I do not have to worry about checking if the web app is running.
I did put up another demo today for a key management app. Check it out here:
http://symkey-anilsaldhana.rhcloud.com/keymg.jsp
What are you waiting for? Give OpenShift PaaS a spin.
