In this chapter, we looked at an alternative to the traditional approach of hosting applications on a company's own infrastructure. The OpenShift platform offers free and paid versions of a PaaS that enables developers to deploy to the cloud without having to worry about downloading and managing the stack, writing scripts, or installing agents.

The OpenShift platform bears some similarities to other cloud solutions, such as MS Azure. Just like Azure, OpenShift is a service managed and run by the vendor. OpenShift provides the ability to quickly choose from multiple cartridges, each of which plugs in a resource required to run your application. With a single Git command, your source code is pushed to the gear, and your application is built and then deployed to the server.

There are several ways to manage your OpenShift gears. First, you can manage them via the command line. This is the best option as you have full control over your gears. Secondly, there is the web interface, which...