Don't Repeat Yourself in the Cloud, Either: Deploying OpenShift Apps to a Second Instance

Recently burningTyger installed Moodle on OpenShift, RedHat's relatively young PaaS. (Moodle is an extremely successful, modular, open-source learning platform. I've used it in several instances before: it can do almost anything an online educator could hope for.) This took a little bit of doing, so burningTyger posted a HowTo on github.

Soon afterward, a friend wanted to use the same app on another OpenShift domain. Well, burningTyger could have sent the friend the app, but the developer's subconscious insisted firmly: DRY, Don't Repeat Yourself! which goes for OpenShift apps too, of course. (At a very basic level, DRY seems especially apropos -- if linguistically paradoxical -- of the cloud, insofar as scalability is encoded in the concept of the cloud itself.)

So burningTyger figured out a way to deploy an OpenShift app to another instance. This means: no repeating code, just repeating setup. Simple to start, simpler to maintain. The RedHat cloud remains calm, never threatening a version-control storm.

If you're a CloudShift user, thinking of deploying an app to multiple OpenShift instances, then read burningTyger's new HowTo and see the multiple-instance problem solved before your eyes.