Bye bye Openshift and hello Metawerx!

One year ago, I migrated my blog platform from wordpress.com to OpenShift v2. It has been a great move since my blog is now running on JavaEE and Angular stacks (which is consistent with what I write compared to PHP/Wordpress) and enabled me to customize some important things for a technical blog like code highlighting, layout, post scheduling, backup etc...which is hard using the
free wordpress.com platform.

However OpenShift v2 will be turned off end of this month and the brand new v3 (based on Docker) doesn't offer a straight migration. The question therefore
is to redo an integration or not and if it does worth to go with Docker for this blog.

After some thinking it turns out that Docker is way overkill for a personal blog and would just mess up the blog development and management. Don't get it wrong,
Docker is an awesome deployment solution but you don't deploy each hour you blog, actually this one is written with an administration zone which makes redeployments useless to add content so having an additional layer at that level will obviously trigger more issues like ensuring you have the right Docker version, ensuring your Docker recipe is always usable and never outdated, even relying on external things like java, TomEE, .... etc...

For a personal blog (actually for a small website without very important SLA), what you want is just one (or sometimes two) instances of your application and be able to modify it with a plain SSH or equivalent (a deployment - vs sourc - git repository is fine). This was basically what has been done with OpenShift v2 since the deployment was put in the OpenShift repository, the build pass of OpenShift was skipped and then the OpenShift instance(s) were just used as plain machines.

Issue with Java hosting is that most of them are very expensive when you add the SSL certificate etc...and that is where OpenShift and Heroku were very smooth and game changer for this kind of small applications.

Luckily for me I got very lucky and had a Metawerx account the company accepted to tune to fit my blog requirement (MySQL database and SSL support). With that setup I have a FTP access to the server and just deploy a plain TomEE here with my blog war. In term of tooling it is quite easy to redeploy the blog since it is mainly just a matter of doing a ftp copy of a .war and restart (in the setup I did). Not that much work to be fully automated!

What is the impact of this change for this blog? It has a new address. You can now find the blog at https://rmannibucau.metawerx.net, the link of RSS Feed here.
Don't hesitate to update your bookmarks, rhcloud (https://blog-rmannibucau.rhcloud.com/) instance will no more get any update.

In terms of migration it has been pretty straight forward:

1. upload to metawerx ftp the server part of the git repository of OpenShift
2. export OpenShift database
3. rewrite the urls in database dump (thanks sed ;))
4. reimport the database in metawerx database
5. configure the new database
6. restart

Looks a lot but was mainly upload time (so depends the connection) more than human time which was really less than 5mn by itself.

To conclude this post I would like to address a big thanks to Neale who helped me to setup this metawerx instance!