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...
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