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Show HN: BitNami Cloud Launchpad

32 points by ridruejo 14y ago

netvarun 14y ago
I just tried it (setting up wordpress) and it was pretty seamless - it was done in 2 mins flat! If you could do bundling of apps into one install - where I pick all the apps I am interested in, and it spins them up in one go, it would be really awesome!
- ridruejo 14y ago
  Thanks! You can do so with BitNami Cloud Hosting. It allows you to select OS, apps, server size, etc. It has a free tier, but you will need to enter your AWS credentials http://bitnami.org/cloud/product-tour http://bitnami.org/cloud/product-tour
gee_totes 14y ago
Does anyone here use PhpCompta? I'd be interesting in learning more about it
- ridruejo 14y ago
  It is very popular in French-speaking countries
themgt 14y ago
How do you guys handle security updates/upgrades?
- ridruejo 14y ago
  It really depends on the applications. WordPress, Drupal, etc. have built-in mechanisms for handling application upgrades and we configure them so it works out of the box. We have "native stack" deployments that hook up to the underlying Apache, MySQL, etc. so you can use the existing native package management tool for upgrading and patching your stack (the drawback is that support is restricted to the server versions supported by the OS). Finally, the most popular method, and what the Cloud makes really easy is to do: just spin up the new version of the app and move over the data. If everything goes well, just shutdown the old machine and use the new one.
driverdan 14y ago
I was looking at Bitnami yesterday but I couldn't figure out what stack the images use. You should list the exact system setup (Linux version, web server, PHP implementation, etc). I then dug through your support and found you're running Apache. Why not nginx + PHP-FPM? Why is Varnish disabled by default? How about Percona instead of MySQL? I'd find this much more useful if you provided an optimized stack instead of this default, unoptimized stuff. Anyone can find Apache hosting but high end, app-specific optimized hosting is much harder to find and more expensive.
- ridruejo 14y ago
  We used to have more details in a previous version of the site, but people complained it was too much information and got confused :) It is something that we need to improve. For now, you can take a look at the Readme and Changelog documents in each one of the application installer and virtual machine sections. It provides detailed information on bundled versions. But you are completely right that we need to make this information more accessible to end users that are interested in it. We ship nginx, PHP-FPM with our LAMP and Rails stacks, but not enabled by default. We prefer Apache by default because it is much more rich in functionality, it works equally well in OS X, Win and Linux, people are used to configuring it, and with Apache 2.4 and the new MPMs, it is very similar in performance to nginx. Varnish is disabled by default because many people use the stacks for local development (at least for installers, for AMIs I think it is enabled by default, but I need to check) When you mention app-specific optimization, what are you exactly referring to? Like a fine-tuned Magento AMI? We are working on something similar to that (incl. multi-server deployment templates) but it is difficult to come up with a one-size-fits-all configuration as performance tuning usually involves tradeoffs.

32 points by ridruejo 14y ago

I just tried it (setting up wordpress) and it was pretty seamless - it was done in 2 mins flat! If you could do bundling of apps into one install - where I pick all the apps I am interested in, and it spins them up in one go, it would be really awesome!

ridruejo 14y ago
Thanks! You can do so with BitNami Cloud Hosting. It allows you to select OS, apps, server size, etc. It has a free tier, but you will need to enter your AWS credentials http://bitnami.org/cloud/product-tour http://bitnami.org/cloud/product-tour

gee_totes 14y ago

Does anyone here use PhpCompta? I'd be interesting in learning more about it

ridruejo 14y ago
It is very popular in French-speaking countries

themgt 14y ago

How do you guys handle security updates/upgrades?

ridruejo 14y ago
It really depends on the applications. WordPress, Drupal, etc. have built-in mechanisms for handling application upgrades and we configure them so it works out of the box. We have "native stack" deployments that hook up to the underlying Apache, MySQL, etc. so you can use the existing native package management tool for upgrading and patching your stack (the drawback is that support is restricted to the server versions supported by the OS). Finally, the most popular method, and what the Cloud makes really easy is to do: just spin up the new version of the app and move over the data. If everything goes well, just shutdown the old machine and use the new one.

driverdan 14y ago

I was looking at Bitnami yesterday but I couldn't figure out what stack the images use. You should list the exact system setup (Linux version, web server, PHP implementation, etc). I then dug through your support and found you're running Apache. Why not nginx + PHP-FPM? Why is Varnish disabled by default? How about Percona instead of MySQL? I'd find this much more useful if you provided an optimized stack instead of this default, unoptimized stuff. Anyone can find Apache hosting but high end, app-specific optimized hosting is much harder to find and more expensive.

ridruejo 14y ago
We used to have more details in a previous version of the site, but people complained it was too much information and got confused :) It is something that we need to improve. For now, you can take a look at the Readme and Changelog documents in each one of the application installer and virtual machine sections. It provides detailed information on bundled versions. But you are completely right that we need to make this information more accessible to end users that are interested in it. We ship nginx, PHP-FPM with our LAMP and Rails stacks, but not enabled by default. We prefer Apache by default because it is much more rich in functionality, it works equally well in OS X, Win and Linux, people are used to configuring it, and with Apache 2.4 and the new MPMs, it is very similar in performance to nginx. Varnish is disabled by default because many people use the stacks for local development (at least for installers, for AMIs I think it is enabled by default, but I need to check) When you mention app-specific optimization, what are you exactly referring to? Like a fine-tuned Magento AMI? We are working on something similar to that (incl. multi-server deployment templates) but it is difficult to come up with a one-size-fits-all configuration as performance tuning usually involves tradeoffs.