Erik,

I haven't tried it (recently) on PaaS providers, but I have on IaaS.  The
AMIs I've created in association with start up scripts (if you're
interested in seeing those let me know, I'd have to look for them somewhere
or other) mean that the application automagically starts up on its own, all
you need to do is go to the URL.  I've used this as a back up method in the
past and I think would be a great way for people to be able to play with
the different apps before committing.

To this end, I created an AMI for Blacklight a while back:
http://www.rosalynmetz.com/ami-3c10f255/  I guarantee you it is grossly out
of date.  I also have instructions on creating an EBS backed AMI:
http://rosalynmetz.com/ideas/2011/04/14/creating-an-ebs-backed-ami/ which
is the method I used for creating the Blacklight AMI. These instructions
are also fairly old, but I still get comments on my blog now and then that
the method works.

I also played around with it on Heroku, but that was so long ago I don't
think any of the things I learned still apply (this was when Heroku was
fairly new to the scene).  Hope some of this helps.

Rosalyn



On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 8:34 AM, Seth van Hooland <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Dear Erik,
>
> Bram Wiercx and myself have given a talk on how to put together a package
> to install CollectiveAccess on Red Hat's OpenShift:
> http://www.dish2011.nl/sessions/open-source-software-platform-collectiveacces-as-a-service-solution
> .
>
> My students are currently happily playing around with CollectiveAccess,
> which they have installed on OpenShift. My teaching assistant Max De Wilde
> has developed clear guidelines on how to run the installation procedure:
> http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~svhoolan/redhat_ca_install.pdf.
>
> It would be wonderful to aggregate these kind of installation procedure's
> for other types of LIS applications...
>
> Kind regards and looking forward to your book!
>
> Seth van Hooland
> Président du Master en Sciences et Technologies de l'Information et de la
> Communication (MaSTIC)
> Université Libre de Bruxelles
> Av. F.D. Roosevelt, 50 CP 123  | 1050 Bruxelles
> http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~svhoolan/
> http://twitter.com/#!/sethvanhooland
> http://mastic.ulb.ac.be
> 0032 2 650 4765
> Office: DC11.113
>
> Le 29 mars 2012 à 14:10, Erik Mitchell a écrit :
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I have been toying with the process of implementing common LIS
> > applications (e.g. Vufind, Dspace, Blacklight. .  .) on PaaS providers
> > like Heroku and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.  I have just tried out of
> > the box distributions so far and have not made much progress but was
> > wondering if someone else had tried this or had ideas about what
> > issues I might run into.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Erik
> >
> > Erik Mitchell
> > Assistant Professor
> > College of Information Studies
> > University of Maryland, College Park
> > http://ischool.umd.edu
>