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Openshift pricing model states that you can have 3 gears in the free tier.

Other services normally explain their free tiers in number of "web workers" that you can have.

What is an openshift's gear exactly then? I know that you can install a different programming environment in each gear, but if you install the same one (let's say: ruby) in all your 3 free-tier gears, do you have 3 web-workers running at the same time? (As in: improving scalability and redundancy; are they load-balanced?)

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Gears can be thought of as equivalents to "web workers" however gears is better described as a unit (collection of resources).

In the OpenShift free tier you only have small gears (1GB mem, 1GB HDD, etc.) So the small gear is a unit of resources that you have for you to use.


If you want an application that scales (using the free tier), it can be done however some find it difficult as DB often get their own GEAR, as well as the LB (HA-Proxy), which does not leave you many remaining gears for scaling.

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To clarify: in a scalable application, a database always gets its own gear. There will also be a gear which has HAProxy and your web framework, leaving you a single gear to scale up to in the free tier. –  Paul Morie Oct 21 '13 at 16:30
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{disclosure: I work as an Developer Evangelist on OpenShift}

We also put a big effort into explaining our pricing in terms developers can understand. Please look at the middle of the pricing page:


There is a section on how gears work. In that section you can see we can show what we load tested to give you a good starting point for what resources a normal Drupal application should be able to use. I find this easier than how many opteron servers I get.

Remember this is just an estimate, and your mileage may vary, but I think it is easier to understand.

We would love to see other people do load testing with other frameworks or applications and give us their feedback.

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