Bitrock (see previous CloudAve coverage), provider of cross platform deployment of open source applications, announced Bitnami cloud hosting earlier this week. It has been in private beta for a while and now it is available for anyone to sign up. To start with they are supporting AWS cloud and soon they will add support for other cloud platforms as well. There are many providers who offer such deployment options and Bitnami is not unique in that respect. In fact, if the user is a little bit savvy, they can easily deploy open source applications from AWS console. However, what liked about Bitnami is the ease with which one can deploy the apps. Their simple UI will allow even less tech literate mom and pop shop types deploy apps they need on the cloud. In short, they simplify the self service part of the cloud deployment.
Bitnami Cloud Hosting is not just a platform to easily deploy open source applications to the cloud but it also offers help in maintenance of these instances and monitoring. For example, after I deploy my apps on to AWS cloud and if my need increases, I can resize the instances with a few clicks and get going without any need to fire up a bigger instance and then transfer the application and data. Similarly, the monitoring tool helps me keep tab on the resource usage and make any adjustments as needed. Another interesting feature is Server Scheduling. For businesses needing compute resources only during the business hours, server scheduling feature can help to automatically fire up and shut down instances during office hours. For small businesses, this tool will come handy without any need to invest in someone with IT admin background.
Some of the features of Bitnami Cloud Hosting are:
- 1-Click Application Deployment
- Automatic Backups and One Click Server Restores
- Server Scaling
- Server Scheduling
- Automatic Monitoring
- Multi-Account Management
As I said, this is a very handy tool for small businesses wanting to run open source applications on clouds. The one thing that bothered me when I checked out the service at very early private beta stage (disclaimer: I haven’t verified it now) is that the application version available in their service lagged behind the actual one available on the developer website. This could be troublesome when it comes to security issues. I hope they reduce the lag to the minimum so that users get to deploy the latest version on the clouds.
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