BitNami Blog

Amazon Linux Support Added in BitNami Cloud Hosting

2012-05-15T03:08:00.001-07:00

We are happy to announce we just released support for Amazon Linux on BitNami Cloud Hosting! Amazon Linux is a distribution of Linux optimized for the Amazon Cloud that is binary compatible with RHEL and CentOS. As with the RHEL support in BitNami Cloud Hosting, we use the native Amazon Linux Stack for deploying the BitNami applications. This means that they are installed on top of the MySQL, Apache, and other components that come bundled with the operating system, allowing you to make use of the OS tools to keep your server up to date.

The Amazon Linux AMI is a supported and maintained Linux image provided by Amazon Web Services for use on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). It is designed to provide a stable, secure, and high performance execution environment for applications running on Amazon EC2. It also includes several packages that enable easy integration with AWS, including launch configuration tools and many popular AWS libraries and tools. Amazon Web Services also provides ongoing security and maintenance updates to all instances running the Amazon Linux AMI. Updates are provided via a pre-configured yum repository hosted in each Amazon EC2 region. Security updates are automatically applied on the initial boot of the AMI. Upon login, the Message of the Day (/etc/motd) indicates whether or not any additional updates are available.

The Amazon Linux AMI is now available at no additional charge in BitNami Cloud Hosting. For more information on Amazon Linux, please visit the Amazon Linux AMI page.

Sign up for free today to run your favorite open source applications on Amazon Linux in the cloud with BitNami Cloud Hosting!

BitNami Brings Your Favorite Apps to HP Cloud Services

2012-05-10T12:08:00.000-07:00

Today, HP's new public cloud offering, HP Cloud Services, was released into public beta. We are very happy to announce that we have made two of the BitNami "bundle" Stacks available on HP Cloud Services: DevPack and WebPack.

BitNami DevPack provides an instant deployment environment for some of the most popular web development runtimes and servers, including PHP, Django, Ruby on Rails, Tomcat, MySQL, PostgreSQL and dozens of others. Everything you need to get started developing and hosting your own applications on HP Cloud Services.

BitNami WebPack includes ready to run versions of three of the most popular open source blog and CMS engines: WordPress, Drupal and Joomla!. It will allow you to deploy fully featured websites in minutes which you can later customize with thousands of plugins and addons available for these platforms.

Both of these BitNami images are available now on HP Cloud Services (you will see them in the default set of images you can choose from.) To learn more about the images and running them on HP Cloud Services, check the BitNami wiki.We plan on bringing more of the BitNami Application Library to HP Cloud Services over time.
HP is currently offering 50% discounts on its service during the public beta, so give it a try!

RubyStack now with RVM and DevKit support

2012-05-08T03:19:00.001-07:00

We are happy to announce that we added support for RVM in BitNami RubyStack for OS X and Linux. RubyStack is a popular all-in-one package for everything that you need to get started with Ruby development in general and Rails in particular. It includes Apache, MySQL, SQLite, ImageMagick, Passenger, etc. RubyStack is free and can be downloaded as native installers, VMWare images or launched as Amazon Machine Images.

This new release of RubyStack includes RVM, a command-line tool which allows you to easily install, manage, and work with multiple Ruby environments from interpreters to sets of gems. This is convenient if you need to maintain multiple projects, dependent on different Ruby versions.

To install different Ruby versions it is necessary to have already installed the main compilation tools. These tools are already included inside our RubyStack Virtual Machines and Amazon Cloud Images. If you are using the native installer, you can check the RVM requirements running the following command:

$ rvm requirements

You can list the installed Ruby versions and use one of them. RubyStack 3.2.3-0 installs and configures Ruby 1.9.3-p194.

$ rvm use system

$ ruby --version

ruby 1.9.3p194 (2012-04-20 revision 35410) [x86_64-linux]

You can install another Ruby version, for example:

$ rvm install ruby-1.8.7-p358

You can find more info at BitNami RVM wiki and at the official RVM site.

For Windows users, RubyStack now ships DevKit. It is a toolkit that makes it easy to build and use native C/C++ extensions for Ruby on Windows like JSON, Thin and others.

JRuby 1.6.7.2

2012-05-04T05:59:00.001-07:00

We have released an updated BitNami JRuby Stack. According to the official JRuby site all users are encouraged to upgrade to this new JRuby version:

"This is a special release of JRuby which only updates our shipped copy of RubyGems to version 1.8.24. This version of RubyGems is the first version to verify that a RubyGems server certficate is valid. This helps to prevent a “man in the middle” style of attack when someone controls a portion of the network between you and the RubyGems server. All users are encouraged to upgrade to JRuby 1.6.7.2."

Apart from JRuby, this stack also includes updated Tomcat and Java versions.

If you haven't started with JRuby yet and you want to give it a try, take a look at our Quick Start Guide.

Enjoy!

BitNami Magento Stack Updated

2012-05-03T08:57:00.000-07:00

We have just released an updated BitNami Magento Stack that includes Magento Community 1.7.0.

This new version help merchants provide a more personalized shopping experience for their customers with the following improvements:

Improved customer segmentation and ordering capabilities.
Added auto generation of coupon codes
Added EU VAT ID validation service integration
Implemented DHL for Europe
Added the Cash On Delivery and Bank Transfer payment methods

Check the full list of enhancements here.

2012 Future of Cloud Survey

2012-05-02T08:30:00.000-07:00

We have partnered with North Bridge Venture Partners and 37 other leading cloud organizations to sponsor the 2^nd annual Future of Cloud Computing Survey. The survey will capture current perceptions, sentiments and future expectations of cloud computing from industry experts, users and vendors of cloud software, support and services. The goal of the survey is to measure how and to what extent the cloud is being used, the key drivers of growth and change in the cloud, and the impact the cloud is having on IT and business operations. The survey will explore areas such as current use, drivers, barriers, and future plans regarding cloud computing. The survey will also reveal profile information on the types of cloud services currently being used.

Please take a moment to share your thoughts on the future of cloud computing. The survey closes June 1st and the results will be published publicly at www.northbridge.com/software around the end of the month. You can also request that the results be sent to you via email when you complete the survey.

BitNami Supports Ubuntu 12.04

2012-05-02T00:33:00.000-07:00

Last week, Ubuntu 12.04 was released, and we are happy to report that our BitNami virtual machine images and cloud templates (AMIs) have been updated to include this latest and greatest release of Ubuntu! Because 12.04 is an LTS, or "Long Term Support" release, this version of Ubuntu will be supported for 5 years, so you can feel confident deploying systems of all types on it.

The BitNami VMs and AMIs make it incredibly easy to check out Ubuntu 12.04 - just fire up a VM in a virtual environment or spin up a cloud instance and you will be good to go. Enjoy!

New version of Jenkins, Upgrading your BitNami Jenkins Stack

2012-04-27T07:40:00.000-07:00

Last week we announced the first version of our BitNami Jenkins Stack. This week a new Jenkins version was announced and we have already updated our stack. However, in some cases it is more convenient to upgrade the installation in place than re-installing. This post explains briefly how to upgrade a Jenkins installation manually.

The first step is to understand where the JENKINS_HOME variable is pointing to. That directory is where all your data is stored.

In BitNami we define JENKINS_HOME in the apache-tomcat/conf/Catalina/localhost/jenkins.xml file pointing to apps/jenkins/jenkins_home. If you want to upgrade Jenkins keeping your data, you just need to download the latest jenkins.war file, copy it in your apache-tomcat/webapps directory and restart Tomcat. It is recommended to create a backup of the previous jenkins.war file, just in case you find issues when upgrading.

On Linux and OSX you can execute the following steps to perform the above (notice that the installation directory is /opt/bitnami in the BitNami virtual appliances and BitNami Amazon Images):

$ cd <installation_directory>

$ ./ctlscript.sh stop 

$ cp apache-tomcat/webapps/jenkins.war apps/jenkins/jenkins.war.bak

$ wget http://mirrors.jenkins-ci.org/war/latest/jenkins.war

$ mv jenkins.war apache-tomcat/webapps/

$ ./ctlscript.sh start

On Windows you can stop the servers from the Start Menu entry or using the graphical tool that you can find in your installation directory. Using the file explorer go to where you installed the BitNami Jenkins Stack. Copy the jenkins.war file from the apache-tomcat/webapps directory to apps/jenkins. Download the latest jenkins.war file and copy it in apache-tomcat/webapps. Now just start the server from the Start Menu or using the graphical tool.

Alternatively to the process above, you can download a new BitNami Jenkins Stack. You can install it to a different location (remember to stop the previous install so there are no port conflicts) and point it to your previous JENKINS_HOME path by editing the file apache-tomcat/conf/Catalina/localhost/jenkins.xml.

Managing your BitNami Drupal installation with Drush

2012-04-23T03:19:00.001-07:00

We are happy to announce a new version of BitNami Drupal Stack. This new version includes support for Drush. Drush is a command line shell tool and scripting interface for Drupal designed to make life easier for people who need to deploy multiple Drupal installations.

Thanks to Drush you can easily manage your Drupal modules, edit configuration settings or backup your sites from the command line.

To get started, you first need to load the right environment. This is done automatically when logging in to a virtual appliance or cloud image. If you installed Drupal on your desktop, you can do so by executing:

/path/to/bitnami-drupal-install-directory/use_drupal

and on Windows by clicking on Start Menu > BitNami Drupal Stack > Use Drupal Stack.

The following are example commands you can run after that:

Download and install a module, for example Content Construction Kit (CCK ) a popular plugin that allows adding custom fields to nodes using a web browser

drush pm-download cck
drush pm-enable cck

Export the Drupal database as SQL, for backup purposes

    drush sql-dump > drupal_backup.sql

Or you can backup everything, including your code, files, and database into a single file

    drush archive-dump default --destination=/backups/drupal_site.tar

Set a variable, for example the site email address

    drush variable-set site_mail mail@example.com

More information can be found in the official Drush guide. Thanks to OpenMelva for their suggestions and feedback Drush and other aspects of our Drupal stack.

Continuous Integration with Jenkins and BitNami

2012-04-19T03:44:00.000-07:00

If you are a developer, you are probably already familiar with Jenkins. Previously known as Hudson, Jenkins is an open source continuous integration server built with Java that supports building and testing virtually any project. It supports different SCM tools, can execute Apache Ant and Apache Maven-based projects as well as arbitrary shell scripts and Windows batch commands, can monitor executions of remote tasks and more. Hundreds of plugins are also available that you can use for configuring your own system based on your specific requirements.

Today, we are happy to announce a first version of our BitNami Jenkins Stack. It includes Apache Tomcat 7.0.27 and the latest (and greatest) available Jenkins version, Jenkins 1.460. As always, you can get the native installers, virtual appliances and AMIs for the Amazon Cloud.

Here are a few notes on the default BitNami configuration:

- Jenkins is configured with Tomcat. For starting Tomcat you can use our Graphical Manager Tool or the ctlscript.sh utility both included in the installation directory (the installation directory is /opt/bitnami in Virtual Machines and AMIs). On Windows, Tomcat is installed as a service and it will automatically start at boot time.

- The JENKINS_HOME variable will point to apps/jenkins/jenkins_home in your installation directory.

- We configure the stack with the standard security setup. The access control is Jenkins's own user database as security realm and we use the Project-based Matrix Authorization Strategy. During the installation process, you will be prompted to enter the administrator user credentials, which by default will be user/bitnami in Virtual Appliances and AMIs. Notice that Anonymous login and user sign up are disabled. After login, you can easily change these settings through the Jenkins Web interface.

If you haven't had the chance to take a look at Jenkins yet, you no longer have an excuse! We know that you will find Jenkins to be a great and flexible is tool, both in the web interface and the APIs it provides. We would like to hear about your experience when trying BitNami Jenkins (good or bad) in any of its flavors (native installers, virtual machines or AMIs).

If you are already familiar with Jenkins, we would love to hear from you as well. We know there are lot of possible configurations with Jenkins and third party components and we would like to get your feedback on how to improve the BitNami Jenkins Stack.

BitNami Jenkins we will be very soon available in BitNami Cloud Hosting too!

Running BitNami in the Cloud with RHEL Presentation Available On-Demand

2012-04-18T08:15:00.002-07:00

If you missed our joint webcast with Red Hat last week, you can now view it on demand. Tune in to see how to deploy BitNami apps using our RHEL-based AMIs in the Amazon Cloud and learn about the benefits of running Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the cloud.

If you would like more configurable deployments, automatic backups, built-in monitoring, one-click resizing and more, check out BitNami Cloud Hosting, which makes it easier to deploy and manage your favorite open source apps on RHEL and other platforms in the Amazon Cloud.

Join the BitNami Team!

2012-04-17T12:00:00.002-07:00

If you are reading this post, you are probably already familiar with BitNami. We provide a library of free, ready to run open source applications that you can run locally or in the cloud. Our stacks have helped literally millions of developers and end users worldwide, from Fortune 500 companies to universities, governments and two-people teams building video games.

We are growing and we are looking for talented, passionate individuals to join our support team.

What your job will look like: You will be responsible for helping BitNami users get started with our apps and work with them to solve any setup and configuration issues they run into.

What we are looking for: Smart, inquisitive minds that have fun solving technical problems and genuinely enjoy helping others.

You should have outstanding communication skills and be comfortable setting up and configuring web-based applications in Linux/Unix. Some of the apps and frameworks we package include Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress, Redmine, Ruby on Rails and Django. You do not need to be an expert on all of them (or at least not at the beginning!) but you need to be proficient enough to help others and learn the technologies you are not familiar with quickly.

Having fun in Sierra Nevada!

We are headquartered in the US, but most of our development team is in Seville, Spain and Krakow, Poland. Ideally you would be located in one of these cities but we will also consider a remote position for the right candidate. You will need to be available to travel a couple of times a year for our company get-togethers (the latest ones involved snowboarding in the Spanish Sierra Nevada and four wheeling on the island of Tenerife, so the travel is not too bad :)

Ready to join the BitNami team? Send us your CV to careers@bitnami.org together with a brief cover letter telling us why you would like to join our team and sharing one example of a complex technical problem you solved and how you went about it.

PostgreSQL 9.1 with PostGIS 2.0 support in BitNami Stacks

2012-04-17T01:46:00.001-07:00

We have been recently working to add support for PostGIS 2.0 in our PostgreSQL-based stacks. For the first release we have focused our efforts in LAPPStack Dev and MAPPStack Dev. These stacks also include Apache 2.4, PHP 5.4.0 and PostgreSQL 9.1.3. Together with PostGIS we have also added support for other PostgreSQL extensions. These are the available extensions on your databases:

You can check our PostGIS Quickstart guide for details how to use PostGIS 2.0 with PostgreSQL 9.1.

Over the next few weeks we will be adding PostGIS support to BitNami DjangoStack, the PostgreSQL module for LAMPStack and RubyStack as well as in BitNami Cloud Hosting. We would love to hear your feedback about this new addition to BitNami!

Help Drive Open Source Adoption by Taking a Quick Survey

2012-04-16T14:27:00.000-07:00

We have teamed up with Black Duck Software, North Bridge Venture Partners, 451 Research and over 20 other collaborating organizations to introduce the 2012 Future of Open Source Survey – the results to be revealed on May 21^st at Computerworld’s Open Source Business Conference (OSBC).

This survey follows on the heels of a very successful five year survey that has sparked important discussions around open source adoption. The survey is supported by working together to address broad industry initiatives that go beyond the scope of any one group. Take the survey here to voice your opinion and hear leading ideas around:

· Hot technologies - such as mobile and cloud - and geographic growth areas for OSS adoption

· Why companies engage directly and strategically with OSS communities

· Industry-specific trends such as the formation of super-communities - communities of communities - dominating the next phase of OSS adoption

· Top up and coming open source companies and projects

The survey results will be available on May 21^st to all respondents and by following discussion on Twitter @FutureofOSS and #FutureOSS. Past survey results are available for viewing on the Future of Open Source Forum.

As an added incentive, all survey respondents will receive 20% off their pass to OSBC!

Exclusive Wordpress Add-ons and Support Discount for BitNami Users!

2012-04-12T09:00:00.001-07:00

We have teamed up with WPMU, a very popular website for Wordpress developers, to get an exclusive, limited-time discount for BitNami users! We are excited to be able to bring you this special offer, which gets you a access to a treasure trove of over 300 Wordpress plugins and themes as well as support from the Wordpress experts at WPMU. You will save time and money with code you can rely on, and have the peace of mind that comes with having the most expert and experienced team behind you. It is like having your own private team of WordPress developers at your fingertips!

Don't miss out and take advantage of a HUGE 65% off of a full WPMU DEV membership - that is a savings of over $270!

Use this link to purchase a 1 year Elite subscription to WPMU DEV for $147 (a $420 value):

https://premium.wpmudev.org/subscribe/?coupon=BITNAMI

Act now, as this deal will expire on Sunday, April 15th!

This is the first time we are running this type of promotion. We would love to get your feedback on whether or not you would like to see more offers and discounts. Let us know what you think by emailing us at hello at bitnami dot org.

Learn How to Run Your Favorite Apps on RHEL on the Amazon Cloud

2012-04-05T08:03:00.001-07:00

Back in February, we announced support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in BitNami Cloud Hosting and published several RHEL-based images (AMIs) for the Amazon Cloud in partnership with Red Hat. Next week, we are joining forces with Red Hat to present a webcast on how to get started with the BitNami RHEL-based AMIs on the Amazon Cloud. In the webcast, we will cover the benefits of deploying applications in the cloud, discuss a few real-world case studies on how others are using the cloud and show you how to use the Amazon Web Services console to launch and backup servers and more. Of course, we will also leave time to answer any of your questions related to BitNami, Amazon and RHEL in the cloud.

Date: April 12, 2012
Time: 10 AM Pacific / 1 PM Eastern / 6 PM GMT

Sign up today for this free event!

UPDATE: This event is now available on-demand. Click here to view the recorded presentation.

BitNami Stacks in Russian and New Features

2012-04-04T09:30:00.002-07:00

We are happy to announce that we added support for a new language thanks to contributions from our community: Russian. We just released Russian versions for several of our stacks: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla! and Redmine.

Russian BitNami Redmine welcome page

Russian Wordpress

These stacks also ship with SSL enabled by default. An SSL certificate gets automatically generated and configured in Apache during setup. Of course you will want to replace it with a real one from a certificate authority if you run it in production, the idea is to ease the task of getting SSL up and running in your server. We will be adding SSL support to the rest of stacks over the next few days.

We like to keep our stacks up to date. We have updated multiple components and libraries for our Linux and OSX stacks, including upgrading:

MySQL to 5.5.21
SQLite to 3.7.10
OpenSSL to 1.0.1
zlib to 1.2.6
OpenLDAP to 2.4.23
ImageMagick to 6.7.5
...and more

We are looking to translate BitNami Stacks to more languages. If you would like to help, please check our wiki entry on translations and start translating in translate.bitnami.org. Thanks to Wjacheslav Wolski for the Russian translation!

Advantages of managing your servers in the Cloud

2012-03-28T09:49:00.001-07:00

Our BitNami Cloud Hosting tool provides a simple way to manage servers in the Cloud. We use it to run most of our internal IT, including a bug tracking system, wiki, licensing application, automatic build and testing setup and a variety of other applications. In a previous post we covered multiple reasons why you may want to run your web apps in the cloud, mainly from the perspective of a developer. In this post I wanted to share some of the advantages of moving your servers to the cloud from the perspective of a system administrator.

When we were hosting our internal applications and build and test systems onsite, we took the following steps to minimize the chance that we lost our data in the event of catastrophic failure:

Servers with RAID disk setups
Daily incremental backups of application, database and source control systems
Full weekly offsite backups
Replicated critical services on remote server setup

When there was an issue in an application or in the server machine itself, at times I had to get the screwdriver and feel like Tim Allen in "Home improvement": get another server, replace hard disks, restore the application from backups, etc while my coworkers asked me "When will be the app ready?". Since we moved those servers to the cloud that has not happened again. All servers are backed up hourly using EBS snapshots, so they can be restored in one click. Short of somebody nuking the Amazon data centers, we do not need to worry about our servers being stolen, the office catching fire or hardware malfunctioning. In the process, we have reduced our monthly electricity bill by approximately $1000 and our build and the time to build and test our stacks to a fraction of the time it took.

Server cloning is another cool functionality that you get for free. Last week we encountered a problem with our customer relationship system. To fix a search-related issue the vendor recommended to run a reindexing process. Our database is quite big, so we were afraid of the impact this would have in the system. If this application had been running in a physical server in our office I would have had to try and duplicate everything in a separate staging machine and run the reindexing process to understand the impact on the system. This process would likely have taken multiple several hours and I would not even be sure the server would behave exactly as the original production one.

With our servers in the cloud, we can create an exact clone of any machine in literally seconds and test any change in minutes. Not in a staging server similar to the production server, but in an identical copy. Not only that, for this task I resized the server to have more CPU and RAM resources and run it the database reindexing process faster. Once I checked that everything was fine, I was able to confidently run the same task in the production instance. I could have chosen as well to scale down the cloned and fixed server and reassign the previous IP address to the new instance.

Some of these issues could have been solved with an onsite virtualized setup and appropriate backup & restore infrastructure. The beauty of using the cloud is that you somebody else took care already of setting that up for us at a fraction of the cost it would cost to build, host and maintain it.

New BitNami Django Stack 1.4 released

2012-03-27T01:47:00.002-07:00

We are happy to announce that the recently released Django 1.4 version is now available as a BitNami stack. After a couple of developer versions we bring you the latest stable version of Django ready to use. This release bundles the new boto 2.3.0 library that includes initial support for Amazon Simple Workflow Service.
You can download a native installer or a virtual machine. DjangoStack 1.4 will also soon be available as an Amazon Machine Image and as an option in BitNami Cloud Hosting, allowing it to be deployed to the Amazon cloud with one click. BitNami stacks simplify the deployment and testing of open source web apps and are an ideal method to test the latest releases of your favorite projects, including Django.

There are a lot of improvements in this Django release. Some highlights include:

Support for time zones when handling dates and times; the framework's new time-zone-aware objects store date and time as UTC internally and translate them to user's local time zone when displayed.
Supports integration with in-browser testing frameworks like Selenium
Many new security improvements and features
SELECT FOR UPDATE support
Updated default project layout and manage.py

New BitNami Concrete5 Stack

2012-03-20T08:02:00.000-07:00

We are happy to announce that a new BitNami Stack for concrete5 has been released! concrete5 is an open source (MIT licensed) content management system that allows you to deploy web applications, websites, stores and forums and easily manage their content and their site structure. concrete5 is also a flexible framework written in Object Oriented PHP 5, and follows an extensible Model View Controller approach.

concrete5 excels at both ease of use and attention to detail. It provides a powerful inline editor and allows extensive customization of the look and feel of the site. You will be able to edit the frontend directly, add new blocks quickly and even drag and drop page elements on the fly.


Adding a new block	Editing content

Now you can easily install and configure your concrete5 application in your system with Native Stacks, run a Virtual Appliance or deploy on Amazon EC2 directly.

Move Servers Across AWS Accounts with BitNami Cloud Hosting

2012-03-15T12:47:00.000-07:00

Today, we rolled out several new features in BitNami Cloud Hosting, the easiest way to deploy and manage applications in the cloud! One we are particularly excited about is the ability to move servers between Amazon accounts and across Availability Zones in one click. This means that you can easily move servers from development, to test, to production accounts in minutes. For users who manage servers for several clients, it also means that you can create server 'templates' that include any extensions, additional applications or custom code and use them to spin up new servers across different customer accounts. To use this new feature, first create a backup by clicking the 'create backup' button on the Manage Server screen, or choose and existing backup and then click 'Restore'. You will see the option to select an AWS account and an Availability Zone at that time, as shown below.

Move servers across AWS accounts and availability zones with BitNami Cloud Hosting.

In addition, we have added search and pagination to the Servers, Backups, Monitoring and other pages to make it easier for you to find a particular server or backup that you are looking for. This will be especially useful for those of you who are running several servers or who have a large number of backups that you need to search through.

In case you missed the announcement last week, we also added support for the new 64-bit server types released by Amazon. These new Small and Medium 64-bit instances fill in the gaps in the previously available server sizes for 64-bit architectures, which jumped from Micro (around $15 per month) to Large (around $230 per month) with nothing in between. The only alternative previously available was to run on a 32-bit architecture, which topped out at Medium instance sizes, which may not be large enough for some production applications. Now, you can get started with a cost-effective Micro instance and increase your server size all the way up to a High Mem 4XL server with 68.4 GB of RAM and 26 cores, or anything in between, in one click!

Why your next web app should be hosted in the Cloud

2012-03-09T08:39:00.000-08:00

The emergence of Cloud Computing is changing how web applications are created, deployed and managed. A dedicated hosted server may no longer be the best option. Whether you are developing basic WordPress or Joomla! sites or building complex e-commerce sites with Magento and SugarCRM, there are multiple ways you can leverage the cloud to your benefit.

This article will cover several of the advantages of moving your customers to a cloud platform. It will also explain how BitNami Cloud Hosting (BCH) can reduce the time you must devote to maintenance chores and help you concentrate on your core competency: web development.

The biggest advantage that the cloud offers is flexibility, a new cost-capacity tradeoff. The acquisition of operative capacity traditionally requires meticulous planning, and it requires investment … at least it used to. The cloud offers the possibility of instantly expanding or reducing the size of your servers, with an immediate impact on your cost structure. You don't have to pre-commit resources for a possible sudden surge in visitors, nor scramble to increase capacity before an unexpected surge drowns your site in a sea of un-responded requests, nor lament costly idle resources when the surge did not (yet?) happen. It's the just-in-time revolution, this time in the server room instead of the factory.
The above said, a cloud environment requires a new set of skills, both in setup and ongoing management of your servers, which can be a time and/or money drain, directly impacting your productivity – just as it was before. BCH significantly reduces the non-core complexity of developing and hosting for web developers – it is a gentle on-ramp to the Amazon Cloud. It is more time available for development. It's the cloud made simple and cost-effective with:

Ready-to-run, consistent, fully configured application environments. No more configuration and version nightmares, such as“which library version is required for this app version?” Your WordPress server is fully configured, up and running in a few clicks. Or SugarCRM, or any of our many full-stack offerings.
On-demand servers that can be started with one click, stopped with another click – and are essentially free when stopped.
Simple server cloning – servers can be cloned in a few clicks to test updates or setup new development servers. Delete them when you are done.
A familiar environment, where things work the same as they do now: you do not have to port or adapt your application to the peculiarities of a PaaS provider. You are still in full control.
Instant rescaling of your servers, up or down, in a few clicks with the instant rescaling of your hosting costs. Scale up to a monster server, or down to a mite. With a traditional hosted server, you typically need to purchase a machine . That means you either need to purchase a big server that will be underutilized during development or purchase a smaller server initially and migrate to a bigger one when moving to production, and spend time and effort recreating the environment in the new server. As your application becomes popular, you will need to manually repeat the same process to migrate to bigger servers as needed. You can bypass this completely by using BitNami Cloud Hosting to dynamically resize your server as needed without any upfront investment.
The ability to run multiple applications on one server. Launch a single server to handle several customers, as you probably did with your hosting solution. Or launch one server for each, gain flexibility, simplify your accounting, and forget all about protecting your customers from each other in order to maintain their service level.
Cost-effective access to development servers on a pay-as-you-go basis. Launch a cheap micro server for development and testing, grow it in one click for deployment. Or develop locally on your own servers, physical or virtual, and easily move to an identically configured server in the cloud when ready.
Full-server, automatic, incremental backups with the ability to restore the server to any of the snapshots that you have configured. Restoring to a server snapshot guarantees that everything runs just at it did, no more version incompatibility nightmares.
Automatic server monitoring. BCH automatically monitors all launched servers and provides CPU, disk, memory utilization and other information so you can keep an eye on your infrastructure

Putting your servers in the cloud gives you more flexibility to manage your cost-capacity tradeoffs: more bang for your buck.

BitNami Cloud Hosting gives you the ability to do so with no effort, significantly reduces your sysadmin time, and frees you to devote your full energy to your core tasks.
Give it a whirl at http://bitnami.org/cloud

New AWS server types in BitNami Cloud Hosting

2012-03-08T12:09:00.000-08:00

Earlier today Amazon announced some exciting new improvements to AWS: the availability of new types of instance types and the possibility to launch 64-bit images on all the available instance types.

Why are we excited? Previous to this announcement, lower-end server types were only available in 32-bit architectures (with the exception of micro). One of the advantages of using the cloud is that you can start with a smaller image and simply resize it as needed. But customers who started with 32-bit instances to save money found they were limited to just 3 types: Micro, Small and Medium. And customers who started with a 64-bit Micro had a quite steep upgrade path in terms of pricing, and were only able to upgrade to a large flavor as the next instance type up.

After this announcement, it is possible now to start a project with a 64-bit micro instance and access the full spectrum of instance types, highlighting the type of flexibility that attracts our customers and users to the cloud in the first place. Combined with the recently announced price reductions it makes hosting your web applications on EC2 more attractive than ever.

We are happy to announce that starting today and just a few hours after Amazon announced these new features and instance types, they are supported by BitNami Cloud Hosting. From now on, the 64 bit instance type will become the default instance type when creating a new server on BitNami Cloud Hosting. Give it a try!

Updated PHP 5.4 and Apache 2.4 BitNami Stacks

2012-03-05T08:59:00.000-08:00

We are happy to announce that we have updated our BitNami PHP platforms Stacks (LAMP, MAMP, WAMP, LAPP, MAPP and WAPP) to include the recently released PHP 5.4 and Apache 2.4.1. You can download the stacks as native installers for Linux, OS X or Windows, and as virtual machines. You will also find ready to deploy Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).

Among the new features in Apache 2.4, you will find major improvements related to performance and memory consumption, as well as Dynamic Reverse Proxy configuration, improved Authentication/Authorization, FastCGI Proxy and a Small Object Caching API. This release puts Apache on par with alternative web servers like nginx for many common scenarios.

Some of the key new features of PHP 5.4 include: traits, a shortened array syntax, a built-in webserver for testing purposes, significant improvements in performance and memory footprint.

In addition to PHP and Apache, the following major components were updated:

phpMyAdmin 3.4.10.1
AWS SDK for PHP 1.5.1
Symfony 2.0.11

Because PHP 5.4 is still very new and not all apps support them, these PHP platform stacks do not support BitNami application modules at this point in time. The stacks are intended for quickly testing and experimenting with these new versions, so please do not run them in production unless you know exactly what you are getting into! If you have any questions or suggestions, we will be glad to help you in our Q&A forum.

Get started with Zend Framework in the Amazon Cloud with BitNami

2012-03-01T08:56:00.000-08:00

In this post, we will walk you step by step through how to start a project with Zend Framework in the Amazon Cloud using a BitNami LAMP Stack Amazon Machine Image (AMI).

To get started, you will need an Amazon acount. You can find how to create your account here. New Amazon users are eligible for a free tier which provides a free micro instance for a year. Once you log in to the AWS Console, go to the EC2 tab and launch a new Instance. You can locate the BitNami LAMP Stack image by searching in the Community AMIs tab for "lampstack-5.3.10", that is the latest version at the time of writing. If you want to run it using the free tier plan, you should run the 32bit or 64bit EBS AMI.

Launching BitNami LAMPStack from the AWS Console

Another option is to launch the image directly from the BitNami website. You can select your preferred region (United States, Europe, Asia or South America), the architecture (32 or 64 bits) and click on the appropriate link.

You can then set different parameters from the AWS Console: availability zone, ssh key, the image type (micro, small, medium) and the security group. Once the machine is started, access it by typing the public DNS name in a browser and you should see a welcome page for BitNami LAMPStack.

Now it is time to connect to the machine. You can download the private SSH key from your Amazon account. If you want to connect to the machine from Windows using the popular tool Putty, you will need to convert your private key to the .PPK format. Take a look at this tutorial if you are not sure how to perform this conversion.

On Linux or OS X, you can open a Terminal and run the following command:

$ ssh -i /path/to/your/private/key.pem bitnami@ec2-xx-xx-xx-amazonaws.com

You will see a welcome message similar to:

BitNami welcome message

All the required files for the Zend Framework are in the "/opt/bitnami" folder:

ctlscript.sh: It is the main script to start and stop the servers.
frameworks/zendframework: The Zend Framework files.
apache2: The Apache server files.
php: The PHP language files.
mysql: The MySQL database files.

One of the advantages of this structure is that it is common to all the BitNami stack types, including native installers and virtual machines. You can install the BitNami LAMP Stack on your own desktop machine, develop your application locally and then migrate the full directory directly to the cloud.

Creating a new Zend Framework project is as easy as type the following command:

$ zf create project your_project_name

You now need to create a new configuration file for Apache. You can edit the files online with a command line editor (nano, vim, emacs) but many people prefer to edit files with a graphical editor locally. Using an SFTP client like FileZilla, you can edit the files from your computer. If you need help, see our how-to for configuration instructions.

Create a folder called conf inside your project:

$ mdkir your_project_name/conf

And inside it create a new file zendframework.conf and paste the following lines:

Alias /zendframework "/path/to/your_project_name/public"

<Directory /path/to/your_project_name/public>
    DirectoryIndex index.php
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

Edit the Apache configuration file /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/httpd.conf and add the following line at the end of the file:

Include "/path/to/your_project_name/conf/zendframework.conf"

Restart the Apache server and visit the Zend Framework welcome page at http://ec2-xx-xx-xx-amazonaws.com/zendframework

$ sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache

Zend Framework welcome page

That's all! You can now create your Zend Framework application in the Amazon cloud. IF Zend Framework is not your thing, remember that BitNami LAMP, WAMP and MAMP Stacks bundle other framework like CakePHP, Symfony and CodeIgniter.