Bitnami in the Clouds

A couple of months back, I posted this about Bitnami. They provide applications such as Drupal, Wordpress or phpBB to be installed natively on a PC, Mac or Solaris box with no existing web application infrastructure stack in place - all in one convenient installation file, providing the complete package: a full-stack infrastructure with the application of choice as the cherry on top.

This makes the whole process of getting a blog, CMS, bulletin board or portal set up as easy as possible. All you need is a modest box to serve it to the company, or to the world at large.

Of course, if you don't have a modest box (a server, in other words), you're stuck. Hosting a public application can be a headache, and there's a cost involved, which can grow as your application scales.

Why not take one of these Bitnami stacks and put it in the cloud? There are lots of cloud providers out there, that will provide you with a scalable site with an application, configure it, manage it, load-balance it and monitor it for you.


Enter Bitnami and RightScale, linked with Amazon's cloud offering. RightScale will give you 10 hours free cloud computing with Amazon EC2, after which further costs are linked to your EC2 account.

I'm not the biggest fan of cloud computing, yet, but if you have a business that needs a public facing site, and you want to put the responsibility of running it firmly in the hands of people that know what they're doing, then I can see how this could be a great solution.