Cloud Hosting and Application Management with Uhurucloud

A few weeks ago, I received an invitation from Marius to try out UhuruCloud (by Uhuru Software).
Today I finally had a moment to check it out.

 Setting up an account was really easy. It was a 2 click signup process (Sign Up -> Auth with Google... DONE!).

Once I got into the management interface, I watched two getting started videos.

One for the web interface: 
http://uhurusoftware.zendesk.com/entries/21726547-getting-started-with-the-uhuru-appcloud

And one for the windows client: 
http://uhurusoftware.zendesk.com/entries/21434952-deploying-and-managing-apps-with-windows-cloud-admin-tool

Using the web interface, I created a cloud "RochesterPaintball". Next, I prepped the site by downloading and extracting the latest DokuWiki webapp artifact from DokuWiki.org. Once the site was prepped, it was a cinch to upload the app to uhuru using UhuruFS as the backing filestore.

I ran through the Dokuwiki installer, but ran into a hiccup. Dokuwiki kept forwarding me to a weird port number which didn't pass through very nicely. Once the setup was complete, I was no longer able to access the app. Pppt. :P

The dokuwiki installer wouldn't let me run the install again, so I started looking into tunneling:
See: http://uhurusoftware.zendesk.com/entries/21493617-using-tunnels-for-accessing-files-and-databases

With a few clicks, I had a local ftp tunnel to the UhuruFS remote cloud filesystem. Using Notepad++ and Filezilla, I was able to login and get access to local.php. I read through: https://www.dokuwiki.org/config and noticed that I set the baseurl wrong (given the weird port 44448 redirection, I had attempted to fix the failing auto-detect, but failed to specify a port). Tada! The wiki was up and running again!

A few moments later, I got a 404 for wiki syntax. So I went back to the root of the site... but I got a 404 there as well. O.o?!

I logged into the web admin interface, refreshed the site status, and found it in a state of "Starting". I reviewed the logs, but didn't see anything that hinted at the service going down or being unavailable. I cranked the VM up to 512m of memory (up from 128m), and the hiccups went away.

I noticed the user registration page wasn't working. I kept receiving an error about being unable to send mail, so I read the mail section of the dokuwiki docs, and installed the swiftmail plugin to get things rolling. Seems to be working so far. :)

Things I like:

• Powerful, intuitive local admin client (See screenshot)
• Easy tunneling
• Swift log access

Things that Could Use a Little Improvement

• UhuruFS service configuration is a two step process. It would be great if the required environment variable could be added by default, rather than requiring an unprompted manual step.
• The only way to access the remote file system is via ftp. You can browse files using the admin client, but can't edit or delete them directly. It would be nice if this could be done directly through the client, or through something like Gladinet.
• I don't see any record in the logs of the app crashing. I definitely received a 404 several times when I shouldn't have, and the problem seems to correct itself over time. It would be nice if there was some record of the issue, or a note saying it takes X amount of time for services to propagate across all nodes.
• The web interface is pretty, but very lacking when it comes to functionality. It would be nice to have a status dashboard for all of your apps, and a way to view logs online.
• There isn't much by way of monitoring. It would be really nice if I could set up notification rules like: "Notify me if the service is no longer in a Running state" or "Notify me if any errors occur in the logs" or "Notify me if the following regex occurs in the log".