Trying to figure out which is the best platform for deploying play 2.1. I tried openshift diy cartrige, but it looks openshif diy cartridge is not production ready yet. I get disclaimer " This is an experimental cartridge that provides a way to try unsupported languages, frameworks, and middleware on Openshift." Does this mean i cannot use for production ?
I am have started evaluation amazon ec2. Any other option or recommendation ? What is the most popular paas for Play framwork ?
Heroku is great to get started and can scale quite a bit. There is close to no lock-in (most of their addons work flawlessly outside of Heroku) and when the time is right you can just deploy to EC2 or even use both concurrently to have easy burstability (just spin up 20 workers when you expect to get hit hard).
Heroku hosts on EC2 east as far as I know and is imho the easiest way to get started.
EC2 is obviously more "robust" but you are on your own. Heroku is git push to deploy, EC2 is "give me a full OS image".
Engineyard helps you to deploy to EC2 and provides other nice things as alerts and customer support at roughly 20% ontop of EC2 costs.
There is tons of stuff in between but I like this route. Get the prototype up at Heroku, scale as much as possible there and when you grow too big to just use this format or need more granular control, go to EC2 (via engineyard if you don't have some DevOps wizards)
p.s.: The "best" platform is and will always be your own data-center. Doubtful you are at that level nor need that level of control. So you don't need best, you probably want "easiest to use and scalable"
"There ain't no silver bullet..."
Update : It depends greatly on your application, its load, your budget, your skills, your frequency of deployments. So it's hard to tell.
From my experience:
This is a loaded question, one that cannot be objectively answered as. I would recommend you to dig in yourself.
However, I can give an overview of CloudBees which has a pretty good Play 2 story which was announced in Oct, 2012 blog.
It is fairly easy to get started with a demo application using the ClickStart feature which sets up the application, database, repo and continuous integration job. The Play 2 ClickStart button is available on the Play 2 download page click Launch on CloudBees. This is also available on the developer wiki click the build it button. You need a CloudBees account to run it though and you can run it on a free account.
Under the hood, each stack is setup via a feature called ClickStack. The Play 2 ClickStack is an official Managed stack, this means CloudBees supports this stack in production. More information on what Managed means is here.
Finally, there is a community page dedicated to Play 2 on the developer wiki link that can give you detailed instructions on using the Play 2 stack.
Disclaimer: I work for CloudBees
Just to update this discussion on my recent finding, Openshift currently does not have prebuild cartridge/framework for Play Framework. We have to create DIY (Do it yourself cartridge ) on openshift. Problem with DIY cartridge is, as of current date, its not auto scalable. So I would have to compulsory pay for 16 gears( silver plan) plus minimum plan fees even if I am just using 5 gears.
Having said that deploying to openshift is very easy and really takes out lot of plumbing and devops work. I got started with openshift with my real application with MYSQL in less than 1 hour. Here is the quick start guide for openshift with Play! if anyone is interested.
Still yet to explore heroku and cloudbees.
