[wplug-internet] PaaS, instead of Hosting? -- New Linode upgrade available

[Pat Barron]

On 4/28/2014 12:02 AM, Bryan J Smith wrote:
> If the group is going to stick with RHEL, and looking forward to 
> Docker ... is there any reason it hasn't considered a PaaS service, 
> instead of a full hosting option (that likely runs as a VM)?
I've actually briefly looked at PaaS (specifically, Heroku), and my 
thought is that PaaS is not really a good fit for how we use the current 
server, and how we might like to use the current server in the future - 
we use the server as a general compute engine in addition to as a 
platform to deliver applications (like the web site) to users.  One 
thing that really presented a problem when I looked at Heroku (which 
still seems to be the case today) was that we host and manage our own 
mailing lists, and I didn't see any mailing list management solutions at 
all in Heroku.  If we moved to a PaaS model (at least, as I said, when I 
was looking at Heroku), we'd probably have to get someone else to host 
our mailing lists, such as moving them into Google Groups or something, 
which we don't really want to do.

Plus, maybe it's sort of old-school of me, but to me it just feels wrong 
if I don't have a shell prompt, and can't arbitrarily type "yum 
install", or even "make ; make install" to make it do whatever we want.  ;-)

Your point is well taken, though, that some kind of PaaS could be used 
as a prototyping platform for a revamped web site, particularly since 
PaaS providers like Heroku and OpenShift do offer a small instance for free.

--Pat.