Feature discussion: Redmine on OpenShift

Tomas Sedovic tsedovic at redhat.com
Wed Mar 28 12:16:42 UTC 2012


On 03/27/2012 10:26 PM, Matt Wagner wrote:
> Howdy teammates,
>
> One of the features to consider during our planning sprint was #3106,
> investigating moving our Redmine install to OpenShift, Red Hat's PaaS
> offering. The Express tier is free, and would free us from having to
> maintain the dedicated VM we run right now for Redmine. The real
> motivation for this task is that Redmine is sometimes _excruciatingly_
> slow, with responses sometimes exceeding ~35 seconds, at which point
> Apache times out the connection.
>
> https://www.aeolusproject.org/redmine/projects/aeolus/wiki/Moving_Redmine_to_OpenShift
> is the wiki page for this feature. (The page might be slow...)
>
> I set up a demo instance[1] of Redmine on OpenShift. After a quick bit
> of experimentation, I found a handful of pros, and one con that I think
> may be a deal-breaker. I wanted to get some more input from the team.
>
> The Pros:
>
> + It's much faster. If you hit it after prolonged inactivity, it may
> take ~10 seconds; I presume this is the time for Passenger to spin the
> app back up. I've only had that happen once; otherwise, it's been quite
> responsive, with average page loads taking under a second. For me, this
> is the biggest win: it's fast!
>
> + It's pretty easy to use. To apply updates, you push to the repo on
> OpenShift and it restarts the app. This contrasts with the current
> setup, where I guess a couple of people have ssh access to some random
> VM where it's running.
>
> + I haven't actually tried it, but it appears that there's an easy way
> to do backups/snapshots, so we don't have to worry about a catastrophic
> database failure. I don't know if anything is in place now.
>
> The Cons:
>
> - Although HTTPS works out of the box, you cannot currently upload
>    custom certificates. This means that, although we can easily run the
>    site on a CNAME (e.g., redmine.aeolusproject.org), we cannot have
>    SSL work that way. There is an open feature request for this, but it's
>    not currently available. Therefore, we would either need to (a) not
>    use SSL at all, or (b) use the default .rhcloud.com domain.
>
> There are some various, unrelated things I'd like to continue exploring,
> such as the persistence of file uploads, how database backups work,
> etc., but I'm wondering if the current SSL limitations should be
> considered a deal-breaker for our needs right now. Please let me know
> what you think.
>
> -- Matt
>
> [1] https://redminetest-mattydubs.rhcloud.com


Nice one, Matt.

If the domain issue is just temporary, I don't think it's that bad. And 
we can start pestering the OpenShift guys to fix this :-).

And if we have Redmine on OpenShift, we could set the blog up there as 
well. I'm sure there's zillion plus one Ruby blog engines around. One of 
them has to be half-decent, right?

Thomas



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