Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Updated BitNami PHP stacks

We are happy to announce new releases for our PHP platform Stacks: WAMP, LAMP, MAMP, WAPP, LAPP and MAPP Stacks. The stacks allow you to setup instant PHP development and testing environments locally in your desktop/laptop or in the Cloud.

This release includes the following updated components:
  • PHP 5.3.8
  • Apache 2.2.19
  • phpMyAdmin 3.3.4
  • AWS SDK for PHP 1.4.1
Enjoy!

BitNami Cloud Tools now with Amazon Simple Email Service

We're happy to announce that the BitNami Cloud Tools installer has been updated and now includes support for Amazon SES! As Amazon explains, "Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers." It integrates with other AWS services to make it easy to send mail from applications hosted on the Amazon Cloud. Since it is Perl-based, we include a precompiled, preconfigured Perl environment and supporting libraries for Linux (x86/x64) and     OS X. 

The updated installer also contains updates to the aws-ec2-api, aws-auto-scaling and aws-sdk-ruby  tools to versions 1.4.4.1, 1.0.39.0 and 1.1.2, respectively.


The BitNami Cloud Tools installer contains all of the available tools from Amazon for developing for AWS. To get started, simply download and run the installer and you'll be ready to start your cloud development project in minutes. Enjoy!

Monday, August 29, 2011

Meet the Newest Addition to the BitNami Family: Piwik

We're happy to report that a BitNami Stack for Piwik has been released! Piwik is an open source (GPL licensed) real time web analytics software program. It provides you with detailed reports on your website visitors: the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, your popular pages and more. Now you can easily install and configure your Piwik application in your system with Native Stacks, run a Virtual Appliance or deploy on Amazon EC2 directly.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

New Features in BitNami Cloud Hosting - Improved UI, Enhanced Monitoring and More

We are excited to announce several new features in BitNami Cloud Hosting! Today we released an improved, simplified user interface for creating and configuring your servers. The monitoring section now includes timestamps on the timeline and support for PostgreSQL. You can attach notes to servers that include additional information or reminders . See below for more details on this latest batch of improvements to BitNami Cloud Hosting.

New Server Creation Interface

Server Creation Interface for BitNami Cloud Hosting

We have updated our user interface, structuring configuration options around application, server and cloud layers. This provides a quick overview of the settings previous to a server launch and provides a foundation on which we will be building future functionality.

In particular, we want to make it easier to use BitNami cloud servers for test and development. As a first step, we are providing you with greater visibility into the software stack installed in the server. Clicking on 'Development options' allows to view the stack components and control of which extra services can be started, including popular addons such as  PostgreSQL, Tomcat and Memcached. As we merge functionality from our BitNami Studio product, you will be able to add/remove components, choose between multiple versions of a product and add your own, giving you the ability to create a fully customized stack.

Configuring the development stack

Enhanced Monitoring

The monitoring reports in BitNami Cloud Hosting now include timestamps, so you can see exactly what time a particular event occurred. To view the timestamps, simply hover over the part of a monitoring chart for which you would like to see a timestamp, as shown in the image below. 

Monitoring timeline

We have also added support for PostgreSQL. If you have added PostgreSQL to your server, or are using an application that requires it (such as OSQA) you will see the status in the ‘Services’ section of the Monitoring tab.

Server Notes

You can now add notes to your servers to help you keep track of information about them. Once a note has been added to a server, a small sticky note icon will be displayed next to the server name on the Servers screen.  Hovering over the icon in the Server section will show the information.

To add a note to one of your servers, go to the Servers screen, check the box next to the server, click on the ‘Manage Server’ button and then the ‘Notes’ tab. You will see a button to ‘Add a note’, as shown below.


Adding notes to servers

We hope you enjoy these new features in BitNami Cloud Hosting. If you don't yet have an account, sign up today for a free trial. With our new OpenID support, you can create an account with your existing Facebook, Yahoo!, GitHub, or Google account, so you can be up and running with your favorite open source applications in the cloud in minutes!


How to add custom domain names to a BitNami Cloud server

Server launched using BitNami Cloud Hosting will contain an automatically generated domain name with the bitnamiapp.com prefix. This works fine for testing and development, as well as for your personal sites, but if you go into production you typically want to assign your own domain name. We now have a detailed wiki article on how to map your existing domain name to your BitNami Cloud server.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Apache Tomcat 7 in BitNami

We're happy to report that the BitNami Tomcat Stack for Tomcat 7 has been released! We are also maintaining the BitNami Tomcat Stack for Tomcat 6.x versions as well, so you can choose the Stack that best meets your requirements.
Tomcat 7 implements Servlet 3.0, JSP 2.2 and EL 2.2 specifications. It also improves memory leak prevention and detection. You can viewmore details on the new Tomcat features here.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Run Your Own Q&A Site in the Cloud with BitNami Cloud Hosting and OSQA

Last month, we released a new BitNami Stack for OSQA, the open source question and answer platform. We're happy to report that, OSQA is now also available in BitNami Cloud Hosting. This means that you can deploy OSQA to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud and get the benefits of one-click deployment, automatic backups and other features from BitNami Cloud Hosting. For lower traffic sites, you can take advantage of BitNami's free tier of service. Combined with Amazon's free tier, it allows you to run your own Q&A site in the cloud FREE for one year. Enjoy!

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

New Features in BitNami Cloud Hosting

We are excited to share some new features we have rolled out in BitNami Cloud Hosting! If you log in to your BitNami Cloud Hosting account (or sign up for a new one), you will see the following improvements:


  • OpenID: You can now setup and sign in to your BitNami Cloud Hosting account using OpenID. This means that you can log in with your Facebook, Google, Yahoo or GitHub account. One less password to remember!   

    Log into BitNami Cloud Hosting with OpenID.
  • Password Reset: Forgot your password? Well, that's embarrassing! But don't worry - we have implemented new functionality that will allow you to reset your password if you have forgotten it. Just click on the 'forgot password' link on the login screen and follow the steps to recover your password.

  • Free Tier Eligibility: We frequently receive questions regarding what is covered by the Amazon free tier of service. BitNami Cloud Hosting now provides visual feedback as to whether or not the server you are launching may qualify for the Amazon free tier. Please note that we will still provide cost estimates that do not take the Amazon free tier into account, as we are not currently able to pull this information from your Amazon account. 


    BitNami Cloud Hosting now indicates if your server may be
    eligible for the Amazon free tier of service.

  • Random Passwords: If you do not specify a password when you launch a new server, one will be created randomly so that you are never using a default password. To view the generated password, click on the 'manage' button after selecting the appropriate server and then click 'show' next to the password entry, as shown below.   


    A random password will be auto-generated if you
    do not specify one during the server setup process.

  • Email Notifications:  You will now receive a notification email every time that you launch a new server that includes details such as the server specifications and estimated cost, as shown below. At the beginning of each week, you will also receive an email summary that lists the servers that you are currently running.  

New email notifications let you know when your server is ready.
We hope you enjoy these new features in BitNami Cloud Hosting. We have several others in the works, so stay tuned! If there are specific features that you would like to see in BitNami Cloud Hosting, let us know by opening a ticket in through our helpdesk

Friday, August 5, 2011

New BitNami Q&A Site


As we mentioned in a previous post, we built a BitNami Stack for OSQA, the open source question and answer platform, because we intended to use it ourselves. We're happy to announce that the new BitNami Q&A site is now live! We believe that the Q&A format makes it easier to find the best answers to your questions and engage with the rest of the BitNami user community. Over time, we'll be migrating users and content from the BitNami forums over to the new Q&A site. If you have any new questions for the BitNami team or community, please make sure you post them to the new site!

Thursday, August 4, 2011

BitNami Cloud Tools for AWS


Today we are happy to announce a new addition to the BitNami family: BitNami Cloud Tools. Over the years, we have become pretty good at packaging open source web applications and making them easy to install. We started with native installers and virtual machines and lately we have had great success with BitNami Cloud Hosting for launching those same apps in the cloud. Now we want to bring the same ease of use to developer and system administrators of cloud environments, starting with the Amazon Cloud. Our first two projects are the BitNami Cloud Tools installer (available now) and the BitNami Cloud Agent (currently in private beta). Our cloud tools installer is a collection of all the official command line tools available for the Amazon tool: EC2, Beanstalk, ELB, RDS, etc. They come bundled with a JDK and a Ruby 1.9 runtime so, with a single download, you get a fully configured environment to start playing with every Amazon API. We will be keeping it up-to-date and adding new tools as they become available.

Everybody loves screenshots :)  So we took some to show you what the installation process looks like


Assuming you already have an AWS account, the next step after installation is to configure AWS credentials properly. The BitNami Cloud Tools stack is already configured in such a way that all AWS tools expect the following files to be present: 


 - config/aws-credentials.txt: You need to add there AWS Access Key ID and AWS Secret Access Key.
 - config/ec2.crt: Copy AWS PEM-encoded X.509 certificate to this location. 
 - config/ec2.key: Copy AWS Private key file to this location. 


Please make sure that all those files are readable only by your user id. On Unix systems you may want to execute the following command: 


$ chmod 600 config/* 


Now you can run any of the available commands to interact with the Amazon EC2 web service interface. You can use these tools to register and launch instances, manage security groups, etc.

On Windows, you can see a Start Menu Shortcut where you can find the "aws-cmd" to start working with AWS Tools.

Start Menu
Listing regions
You can list the instances that you have currently running, in this case from OS X.
Listing running servers


The complete set of tools included in this release:

aws-ec2-ami 1.3-66634
aws-ec2-api 1.4.3.0
aws-beanstalk
aws-elb 1.0.12.0
aws-iam 1.2.0
aws-rds 1.4.006
aws-sns 1.0.2.3
aws-auto-scaling 1.0.33.1
aws-cloudformation 1.0.8
aws-cloudwatch 1.0.12.1
It also ships the AWS SDK for Ruby and Java:
aws-sdk-ruby 1.0.3
aws-sdk-java 1.1.7.1

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

BitNami Redmine Stack now available in Spanish and Japanese!

Hello! ¡Hola! こんにちは!

We have been working on a lot of exciting new features and improvements for BitNami and BitNami Cloud Hosting that we will be releasing over the next few weeks. Today we are really happy to announce support for Japanese and Spanish for one of our most popular stacks: Redmine is a great project management tool that is both flexible and easy to use. The new language support means that the whole installation process and application setup have been localized, making Redmine more accessible than ever for users that are not fluent in English. This is the first of many stacks to be localized. If you are interested in helping with the effort, or would like to see a specific stack localized, please let us know.  We want to thank Sakai Kei for his help with the Japanese translation.

Screen capture of the installer running in Japanese mode
Redmine habla español!