How long does OpenShift Starter account provisioning take? - openshift

For about a week now, it says:
Queued for provisioning
Due to an increase in OpenShift Online Starter popularity, please
expect a longer delay in account provisioning. You will receive an
email when there is enough capacity to add your account. Thank you for
your patience!

Two weeks!
It took two weeks for Red Hat to finally provision the account. Yesterday I finally received an email:
Your OpenShift Online account is ready!
Obviously I had already moved to another provider in the meantime.
(Note that the status page had not displayed any technical reasoning for the delays. It was "all green". It's pretty obvious that this is just tactics to avoid getting users on the free tier.)

Related

What keeps my "always free" account from being terminated?

I have a small website running on the "always free" tier. It's perfect for my needs. After my trial period ended (and I hadn't used any fee-based resoures), I reverted back to "always free." This is fine. This morning, I received an email which read, in part:
Your Always Free resources will remain available to you as long as you
actively use your account.
but doesn't define the meaning of "actively use your account." I would just chat online with someone, but that's not available to me. I tried to use their community forums, but their login seems busted, so I landed here. (No offense, but I was under the impression this is mostly for development questions.)
Is having a website running sufficient to qualify as "active use?" Do I need to login to the console periodically? No matter the use, what constitutes "active?" For example, if I am required to login the the console periodically, how often to I have to do that? Weekly? Monthly?
Based on the "Inactivity Monitoring and Database Stoppage" sections of the documentation, Always Free account activity works like this:
Oracle Autonomous Database: "Successfully making a SQL*Net or HTTPS connection resets these measurements to zero"
APEX: "Successfully making a HTTPS connection resets these measurements to zero."
COMPUTE and others: Unknown - I can't find the relevant documentation
Per the documentation, you get 7 days before the resource is automatically stopped, and then 90 days before the resource is permanently deleted.
Based on my experience with the database, you get a warning email after 7 days, and then 2 days later the resource is stopped. You get a warning email about permanent deletion after 60 days, and luckily I don't have experience with how long it takes for a resource to be permanently deleted.

Sign up for Openshift Online with voip number?

I'm trying to sign up for Openshift Online, and it wants my phone number. However, it identifies my Republic Wireless number as a VOIP number for whatever reason, and gives me an error that I need a different number. After 3 attempts, it says.
We're sorry for any difficulties you've encountered, but we're unable to further verify your account.
If you are having problems, please contact support.
I've contacted support, but I'm hoping there's an easier way. It's the same if I try to sign up for a $50 a month account.
FYI, the openshift support person was able to manually confirm my account and keep me moving. Just needed to open a ticket.

Google Cloud Error: The zone does not have enough resources available to fulfill the request

Apologies if this question comes off a bit ranty, but is this error supposed to be commonplace? I'm trying to use a compute instance with GPUs attached in the asia-east1 region. However I frequently (at this point every day) encounter this issue for hours at a time. Today I stopped the instance I was using for all of about 2 minutes before starting it again only to get this error. I've used AWS in the past and never had this issue. How are people supposed to use gcloud in any serious capacity when it seemingly never has enough resources available?
This is a common error message that appears from time to time. Many resources (CPUs, IPs, etc) in the Asia Regions/zones are at full capacity.
Also, note that if you are a Free Trial user, you will not be able to use GPUs, if you want to use GPUs you might need to upgrade your account

How can I get an answer on my quotas change request?

I've made several requests to change my persistent SSD storage on Google Compute starting almost a month ago but I've never received any answer from Google. What should I do to obtain that quotas upgrade?
The Google documentation points to Stack for requesting help, therefore I ask my question here.
Quota Increase requests are usually actioned upon within 2-3 days, usually during regular work days. You ought to have received, at least, the confirmation email of your original request. If you didn't, perhaps the entered address was not correct.
Another possibility is that the request came from an address that, at the time, was not entitled to request such an increase, that wasn't the owner.
And there's always the ever-present spam folder, where some notifications always seem to land.
Also, be aware that projects in free trial are not allowed to request quota increases: in order to do that, an upgrade out of the free trial is required.
You can always submit a new Quota Increase request: I'm sure it will be actioned upon on short notice. :-)

openshift application goes idle and halts its cron jobs

I use openshift to run a script from time to time with the cron cartridge.
however, as my application has no web activity (yet) it goes idle and my process doesn't run.
one could think of an ugly solution to generate fake web-load by using another service (such as ifttt to retrieve a page constantly but this sounds wrong.
could there be a better solution?
apparently the only way is to trick openshift to have out-coming traffic, I used a free account of https://www.site24x7.com for that
OpenShift will idle your application after 24 hours of inactivity1, but you can add an hourly cron job to your app to keep itself alive.
.openshift/cron/hourly/ping.sh
#!/bin/bash
PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin
app_url=http://$OPENSHIFT_APP_DNS/
curl --insecure --location --silent --fail "$app_url" >/dev/null
Assuming your app isn't already idled and won't run the cron job :-)
1 Apparently the idle period used to be 48 hours before, but now it is 24 hours according to the OpenShift pricing table. In other words, a daily pinger cron job won't do it for you.
Openshift cartridge goes idle after 24 hours of inactivity.
Activity is considered receiving a Get request in your application originated outside your cartridge (so pinging your app from your own cartridge doesn’t work).
You can use any free pinging service to ping your application after a specific interval of time(< 24hrs).
You may use Pingdom. I have found success using it. It provides a nice dashboard and graphs of response time as well. You will be notified if there is any issues connecting to your app or if its down. You can manage your account with their mobile apps.
There are other free pinging services too. Feel free to Google and try out other services. Do comment if you find a good one, might be a great help for some :-).
It's not really a "trick" per se, but as long as you have consistent incoming traffic, your gear will not idle.
Bronze is free. All plans retain the free stuff, e.g. 3 free gears etc. you will only pay $0.02 hr on gears above 3.
So if you are using the free tear and not using 3 gears you should be safe to upgrade to bronze and remain free.
In your nodejs app:
Create an httpserver able to dispatch a get request page
Include a cron job into your array job list that every hour send a post to external page (php,jsp or every kind of "page" that can create a curl request).
In external page:
Execute the logic of a job (optional because you can use job2, job3..jobn and leave this job just for hold your app awake)
Insert somewhere in the code a request back to nodejs server page using php curl library.
In this case:
At every hour, idle timeout will be reset and your application stay awake
You can decide to put jobs in external pages and/or nodejs
Hope it helps someone.
EDIT: I'm sorry, it's not working anymore. No matter which kind of strategy you use, they will be able to discover systematic requests coming from a specific IP and exclude this situation, bringing your app idle for earn money, because everybody know that BRONZE is not FREE. It costs at least 0.02$/hour.