It's been five months since we announced and released the Silver Plan in the United States, Canada and most of Europe. We're extremely excited to see continued developer and application growth on our production-ready OpenShift Online service.
In the last year, OpenShift Online has experienced significant momentum, growing its user base by 259% and its application count by 322%, year-over-year, with increased adoption across all major supported technology stacks. See our growing gallery of applications for an idea of how others in the community are using OpenShift Online.
New Feature Highlights
Custom Environment Variables
Zero downtime deployment for scalable apps
Team collaboration
Deployment and rollback system developers love
Node.JS 0.10, Python 2.7, and Postgresql 9.2 support
Read more about OpenShift Online's newest features
OpenShift Online Silver Plan
Silver Plan users will continue to receive the following for the $20 monthly platform fee:
Customer Service
Red Hat Technical Support
3 small gears included for free
SSL Protection for Custom Domain Names
Up to 6GB of file system storage per gear
Auto-scaling up to 16 gears
And now, 3 gear sizes to choose from:
Small (512MB RAM)
Medium (1GB RAM)
Large (2GB RAM)
More Countries, 2GB Gears, Lower Prices
With our commitment to offering an unparalleled, competitive and compelling Platform as a Service, it is my pleasure to announce:
Reduced gear unit prices effective immediately!
Large gear size: 2GB RAM (available December 2013)
Silver Plan added to fourteen new countries: Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (available December 2013)
Gear pricing for the Silver Plan is reduced 50%
Small gears: $0.04/hr → $0.02/hr per gear
Medium gears: $0.10/hr → $0.05/hr per gear
Large gears: $0.10/hr per gear (New--December 2013)
We're able to reduce prices because of the increased density of our containers and the operational efficiency we've achieved while creating 1.5 million applications, and counting. It's all made possible by the expertise of our operations team and awesome underlying open source technologies. We're passing these savings on to you.
What happens to the Free Plan?
Nothing. The current Free Plan remains unchanged and available to everyone. It continues to provide three free small gears with 1GB of file storage each as per our pricing page, and the use of all available cartridges.
How Does OpenShift Stack Up Against the Competition?
Let's compare a simple web application or mobile application backend running on different providers:
OpenShift Online
Amazon Web Services
Heroku
Let's assume the application uses MySQL and a scalable front-end for the web framework like Rails (Ruby), Symfony (PHP), Django (Python), or Spring (Java).
Don't forget OpenShift Online includes the following at no additional cost:
Data transfer (in and out)
Auto-scaling capability
Enterprise-grade support from Red Hat
Full-stack management and automation
ssh access
Snapshots for backups
Red Hat Enterprise Linux's native security model (SELinux and cgroups)
Integration with great developer tools like Eclipse, JBoss Tools, and Zend Studio
Cost Comparison
OpenShift Online
To host this production-ready application on OpenShift Online, we can create an application using:
Medium gears for the web framework tier in a scalable application, scaled up to 3 gears ($0.05/hr or $36/month per gear)
Medium gear for the MySQL DB tier ($0.05/hr or $36/month)
Silver Plan platform fee ($20/month)
Total cost = $164/month (3 × $36 + $36 + $20)
Now let's compare our application and all the functionality that comes with OpenShift Online to other providers.
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services EC2 is arguably the most well recognized Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
We can create comparable configuration using:
Small EC2 instances for the web framework tier
Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) for load balancing
Relational Database Service (RDS) small instance for MySQL
In this configuration, we need:
3 small instances ($0.06/hour or $43.2/month)
1 RDS small instance ($0.08/hour or $57.60/month)
1 ELB ($0.025/hour or $18/mo)
Total cost = $205/month
Reference: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
Price calculations assume these instances run constantly for the full month--not including bandwidth and other charges. If it were possible to run our web framework example on Micro instances we could reduce the price $80/month, closer to the small gears OpenShift Online provides.
Look what else is missing:
+ No PaaS automation:
+ auto-scaling
+ stack management
+ automatic security updates
+ snapshots
+ tools integration
The value and benefit of Platform as a Service (PaaS) becomes much more apparent in this example.
Heroku
Now let's take a look at another Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider--Heroku. This is a closer comparison to OpenShift Online (also a PaaS).
To create a comparable configuration we need:
3 "2x" Dynos (1GB RAM) ($0.10/hr or $72/month)
Basic starter database ($9/month)
Total Cost = $225/month (3 × $72 + $9 = $225)
Reference: https://www.heroku.com/pricing
Here's comparison with an OpenShift Online small gear and the "1x" Dyno (512MB):
3 "1x" Dynos (512MB RAM) ($0.05/hr or $36/month)
Basic starter database ($9/month)
Total Cost = $117/month (3 × $36 + $9 = $117)
That's 37% higher for the "2x" Dyno and 50% higher for the "1x" Dyno. Heroku doesn't have a Dyno that is comparable to our large gear.
What's missing:
Larger Dynos (2GB) are not available
Enjoy the Silver Plan Now
If you haven't tried OpenShift already, experience it yourself now, by signing up for a free account. All it requires is your email address and a password. OpenShift is improving all the time. Check out all the features we've added in the past 6 months.
When you're ready to upgrade to the Silver Plan, follow these screen-by-screen instructions provided by our Customer Enablement Team.