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.

Bitnami Newsletter, May 2009

BitNami - Full Stack Infrastructure and Applications

Installing Drupal or Joomla, Wordpress, phpBB or Moodle is not such a big task. However, first you need to have an environment set up on which to install it. Windows or Linux, Apache, MySQL (or PostGre) and PHP (or Ruby or the JDK/JRE). Each one installed one-by-one, each one taking a little bit more of your time to install and configure. Environment variables, hostnames to be set, configuration files to be edited - it might take you a few hours, or even a few working days.

You can speed things up by installing WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP), LAMP (Linux, etc.) or even MAMP or SAMP (Mac, Solaris), as dictated by your OS. XAMPP is another option. This will give you a full stack infrastructure that you can install applications on and will really save you time. But why not download a full stack infrastructure with an application install of your choice thrown in?



Cue http://bitnami.org/, who will give you just that. A slipstreamed installer for an ever increasing number of apps, and the infrastructure of your choice on which to host them.

I was looking for the latest version of Drupal, and BitNami had version 6.9-0, which is pretty impressive, since the latest is 6.10, so it's pretty close. But there's Joomla (which I installed on my painstakingly built stack just 2 weeks ago - before I stumbled upon BitNami), Moodle (eLearning), Wordpress (blogging), JasperServer (portal app), MediaWiki and phpBB (the premiere bulletin board app) all there for you to install and use as you see fit.

Develop, host, and build a production site if you want. You can even install Drupal, Subversion and, say, phpBB on the same native server. Keep the installed app(s) running, and each subsequent application installer checks for ports in use and prompts you to select a free port to listen on. They really have thought of everything.


So you have no excuse. It's easier than ever and you can even install them on Vista. You can even install several on VMware images if you want to spare your native OS. Best of all, it doesn't cost a penny and will cost you very little of your precious time.