Took the Cloud Foundry tutorial finally

Back in May 2011 I signed up for a Cloud Foundry beta account so I could give the new PaaS service a whirl. It's taken me this long to get around to it (better late than never).

The tutorial begins by installing ruby and gems (I did this on Ubuntu 11.10), install vmc (the tool you use to interact with Cloud Foundry) via gems, "push" deploy some sample hello world Rudy code, and finally check it out in a browser. Making changes to what you deployed is easy: simply make changes to the code, then "update" the application; this re-deploys the application and restarts the running application using the new code. Refresh the browser and there it is. Pretty straightforward.

A couple of hiccups to watch for if you follow the same steps as me:

• When I tried "vmc target api.cloudfoundry.com" I was getting "invalid date format" errors. Turns out there's a version issue with the Ubuntu supplied Ruby packages. To fix it, I had to install Ruby 1.9.2 from RVM: https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/
• After a few clicks deep I found the "Getting Started..." guide. It's in a support forum and it's a PDF which is kind of odd. I was expecting a one-click away wiki-like resource.
• For getting started, I suspect the Youtube videos > PDF

I'll spend some more time with Cloud Foundry and post updates if they're interesting enough.