New OpenShift PaaS Release - Nov 6, 2012: Mongo 2.2, Tomcat and more!

Lots of great work happening in OpenShift and we are happy to announce another release available today!

Client Tools now make use of an updated REST API

First, we have been working on a complete overhaul of the CLI tools that all use our REST API (the old tools had some functions still using a deprecated API). In addition to this some usability changes have been introduced that make the tools easier than ever to use. Make sure you update to the latest to use these new feature with:

sudo gem update rhc

Introducing Typeless Gears

Another feature landing is something we've been calling “Typeless gears”. They're basically an effort for us to make sure the different cartridges that make up a gear (so for example PHP and MySQL) are properly namespaced and can exist on their own or together. This involves some variable name changes (you can ssh to your gear and run “export” to see a list of all of your env variables). The important thing here is that some tricks you used to be able to do might not work immediately. For example:

 $OPENSHIFT_DB_HOST is now $OPENSHIFT_MYSQL_DB_HOST

Apps created prior to the update will continue to be able to use old style env vars or the new ones.

Another note is that we are finally removing the directory ~/$OPENSHIFT_APP_NAME. This change probably has the most impact on people just in that you should always reference the cartridge via the cartridge name, no longer your app name.

Tomcat now available as a cartridge type

Jbossews-1.0 (which ships with Tomcat) is now available as a cartridge. Those of you that have been looking for Tomcat, this is the cartridge for you. Jbossews-1.0 comes with tomcat-6.0! Check out this post and video on how to get started.

Upgraded MongoDB cartridge now supports version 2.2

Mongo 2.2 is now up and running in production. Everyone's database was already migrated and you are now running the latest and greatest. Check out this blog on what's new in MongoDB 2.2.

Other features in this release

Beyond the new cartridges we now have hot deployment for Python and Node.js. We've also fixed a lot of bugs and have better scaling exposed via the website and CLI tools. As always with our releases, let us know how things go for you.