Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Are you ready for Black Friday?

For most of us, we think of the day after Thanksgiving as the beginning of the holiday shopping season. For the administrators, maintainers and programmers of online stores, it may be the busiest and most stressful day of the year. Is your marketing team already emailing thousands of customers regarding upcoming promotions? Are you ready for them all to show up on your site at the same time? Read on to learn how to prepare your server for large spikes in traffic, as shown below. Note that most of this article and instructions apply to servers running in Bitnami Cloud Hosting.


Resize your machine!
If you expect a significant spike in traffic and your server is not yet prepared, we strongly recommend that you re-size your machine in advance. IMPORTANT: Resizing your server will stop it so that it is unavailable for a few minutes, so make sure you do this when you typically have the least amount of traffic. Also, if resizing the disk is not necessary, you should avoid doing so, as it slows down the resize process.

If the worst-case scenario occurs and your server suddenly becomes unresponsive, it will probably be due to the larger-than-normal number of visitors on your site. The slower the server response is, the more often your users hit the Refresh button in the web browser, which makes things even worse.
You can re-size your machine to a larger instance type, but there are few things you may want to consider doing first:

- Let your users know about your performance problems. Update your Twitter/Facebook account statuses to let you them know that you are working on fixing things, and try to update it often so they are aware of the process. This may help to reduce the number of people who are constantly refreshing the site.

- Turn on your application's maintenance mode if possible. Some applications allow you to switch to a special read-only maintenance mode which informs the end-user that the page is unavailable at the moment but it is going to be back online soon. This way users will not try to refresh your page constantly. It also prevents them from running into further issues or inconsistent states for example when clicking the order button and getting a timeout.

Once you are ready, sign into the BitnNami Cloud Hosting console and go to your server manage section. Click the Resize button:



The bigger the instance you use, the better. While the cost may be higher, it will significantly improve your server's performance and, because you are running in the cloud, you can simply resize back down to a smaller server after the rush is over.

Once your server is back online, turn off the maintenance mode and wait for few minutes. All your users will want to try to access it now, which may cause performance problems again for few minutes but then the server load should return to a more normal state. This is the time when, if you use caching, all of the cached pages are regenerated. Observe your machine but do not make rapid decisions. If everything is ok, then update your Twitter/Facebook accounts.

Are Evil bots affecting your site performance?

Performance problems may also be caused by misbehaving Internet bots or some other malicious scripts trying to index or scan your site, accessing as many sub-pages as possible at the same time. Follow the steps below to see if this may be happening to your site.

First, analyze the last 10000 entries in your Apache access log. The first command will show you when the analyzed period starts and the second one will list the most active IP addresses.

$ cd /opt/bitnami/apache2/logs/
$ tail -n 10000 access_log | head -n 1
$ tail -n 10000 access_log | awk '{print $1}'| sort| uniq -c| sort -nr| head -n 10


Based on the results, you can check the IP addresses with the highest number of requests using the “whois” command. You may reject all of the requests from the specific IP address by adding the Deny option in the Apache configuration file. In the example below, we will reject the 1.2.3.4 IP address in the WordPress config:


<Directory /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs>
deny from 1.2.3.4


Before restarting Apache, check if your changes are okay by executing the following command:

apachectl -t

Then restart the Apache web server:

sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache

Improving the performance of your site
Improving the performance of your site is not an easy task. There is not a "one size fits all" solution to any problem and good configuration requires lots of research, testing and depends on many different factors: application technology, installed application plugins/extensions, type of the application etc.

There are few things that you may start with:
  • Cache your pages and limit the number of requests to your database.
  • Minify your Javascript and CSS and minimize the number requests to your web server.
  • Use Varnish.
  • Use CDN.

We describe all these aspects in our wiki.


Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Gitorious 3.0 released!

http://bitnami.com/stack/gitoriousWe are happy to announce a new major release for Gitorious, version 3.0.

Gitorious provides an open source infrastructure for hosting projects that use Git. It also supports projects with wikis, a web interface for merge requests and code reviews and activity timelines for projects and developers.

BitnNami Gitorious Stack provides a one-click install solution for Gitorious. You can download installers and virtual machines or run your own Gitorious server in the Amazon EC2 or Azure clouds. You can also now launch a free cloud demo server with the Bitnami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the launch button below.



The recently released 3.0 version ships a refreshed UI, a lot of improvements, and new features. The new repository browser comes with improved syntax highlighter, ability to select lines of code and friendlier navigation. It also has a nicer Dashboard, an improved merge request page and a new settings section.


Project Activities
Diff page

The service hooks feature was extended with the support for built-in integrations for external services.

 
Web hooks



In addition to that, Gitorious 3.0 now uses Ruby 1.9.3 and Rails 3.2.15 and all 3rd party gem dependencies has been updated to the latest versions.

Gitorious is developed by Gitorious AS, which also provides commercial prepackaged versions of Gitorious as well as managed servers and professional consulting services. Make sure to check them out if you need commercial support for Gitorious.

Monday, November 25, 2013

Ruby security issue: Applications Updated on BitNami

http://bitnami.com/stack/ruby
A Ruby security vulnerability was recently published: Heap Overflow in Floating Point Parsing. We want to let BitNami users know that our Rails-based application installers, virtual machines and cloud images have been updated already and released: Redmine, Tracks, Discourse, GitLab, Publify, Spree or Gitorious, Diaspora and we continue releasing others like Radiant.

We have also updated our development Ruby Stacks to include the latest patched version of Ruby: 1.9.3, 2.0.0 and 2.0.1preview.

If you already have installed a version of these applications, please make sure that you update your environment or apply the appropriate patches.

Welcome to the Newest Bitnami Stack, SiteCake!

htp://bitnami.com/stack/sitecake
We are happy to announce a new member in the Bitnami family: SiteCake! SiteCake is a simple, drag-and-drop CMS for fast editing.

Thanks to the community votes in our contest, SiteCake was selected to be packaged as part of the BitNami Library. You can now download free, ready to run native installers for Windows, OS X and Linux, virtual machines and Windows Azure & Amazon EC2 cloud images.

If you just want to check out SiteCake, you can instantly launch a free 1-hour cloud demo server with the BitNami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the button below. The default password is "bitnami".



Nikola Mircic, developer of the SiteCake project, was kind enough to answer some questions for those of you who may not be familiar with the project.

1. What is the goal of the SiteCake application?

SiteCake's goal is to make website editing a simple, drag-and-drop experience. Every type of file, document, media file or item you drag on your website SiteCake should be able to interpret and integrate in the most meaningful and beautiful way. On the other hand, SiteCake should empower designers to make pure HTML websites editable. No savvy developers needed.

SiteCake CMS sample application

2. What are some of the features of SiteCake?

- SiteCake is very basic CMS, it has only 10% of the feature set of other systems, but it is the 10% that is used 90% of the time.

- It's true WYSIWYG. There is no separate admin section, you can click any page element and edit it in-place.

- There is no special template system. Editable zones are assigned with simple css 'sc-content' class.

- It's the fastest CMS on the market - all server calls are done in the background.

- It has unlimited undo steps. It allows you to experiment and be creative.

- Also many more little things that make the experience of editing frictionless.


3. Which projects or organizations are using SiteCake currently?


SiteCake is a CMS for simple static websites that need partial content updates. We targeted small businesses, organizations or event organizers. Restaurants that need an easy way to update daily menus, B&B hotels that want to change prices and accommodation details quickly, NGOs, event websites and portfolios.

4. What do you expect will be the main benefits of having BitNami packages available for SiteCake? 

With Bitnami packages, cloud will become an easy hosting option for small business and personal websites. Packages are great opportunity for a user to quickly test and evaluate the CMS.

We are glad that SiteCake is now part of BitNami. Would you like your favorite app to be part of BitNami? Be sure to suggest and vote for it in our contest!

Friday, November 22, 2013

Security fix for Drupal, new versions 6.29 and 7.24 released

http://bitnami.com/stack/drupal
The Drupal project has just released two new versions that fix multiple vulnerabilities. You can find more info about them at the Drupal blog post by the security team.

We have released BitNami Drupal 6.29 and 7.24 installers, virtual machines and Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure cloud images that fix this issue. You can also download BitNami Drupal 8.x version that allows you update Drupal files to the latest development version with Git.

We also released new versions of Drupal-based projects: CiviCRM 4.4.2 and OpenAtrium 2.09

Thursday, November 21, 2013

Diaspora*, the Online Social World Where You are in Control

Diaspora* is an Open Source distributed social networking service. It was released as part of the BitNami Library a month ago.

You can now download free, ready to run native installers for OS X and Linux, virtual machines and Azure and Amazon EC2 images for Diaspora*. You can also now launch a free cloud demo server with the BitNami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the launch button below.




Jason Robinson, one of the Diaspora* project contributors, was kind enough to answer some questions for those of you who may not be familiar with the project.

1. What is the goal of the Diaspora* application?

The goal of the Diaspora* application is to allow people to control their own social network. A lot of people distrust the large centralized social networks, especially now after all the Prism revelations. With Diaspora*, users can host their own data and only share around the network parts of that data. We call these servers "pods". When a user installs a pod (for example using the BitNami packages), that pod will be able to communicate with users on other pods just like you can communicate with other users on Facebook for example. The difference is that the user hosts their own data and thus has more control.

The purpose does not end in privacy. An important thing to note is of course that Diaspora* is open source. Got coding skills and miss a feature in your favourite social network? With Diaspora* you can make that feature - just talk to the project first if you also want it merged into the main code base https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/How_we_communicate

Of course you don't need to host a pod to join Diaspora*. Just go to http://podupti.me which is a good pod list, select a pod near you and sign up!

Diaspora* dashboard



2. What are some of the features of Diaspora*?


The most awesome feature that sets Diaspora* apart from the other social networks is the flexibility when composing posts. Posts support full markdown syntax, which means you can even use it for blogging (like Tumblr). Another distinctive feature is that there are different kind of streams that you can view - and by default all the streams are combined for easy of use. Streams can be posts from people you follow, posts with followed hashtags, posts with interactions (like mentions), and you can also group people into Aspects (like Circles in G+) and view only one or more streams at a time. Image uploads in posts are supported with a nice lightbox style picture viewer.

All in all the UI is very modern and nice to use for a user with any technical level. Unlike Facebook for example, it is more minimal, since Diaspora* doesn't make you "spy" on your friends activities in real time, we don't have a gazillion of apps posting in your feed, and of course there are no ads or promoted posts, only stuff you really want to see.

3. Which projects or organizations are using Diaspora* currently? What kind of projects do they use it for?


Since Diaspora* is decentralized, which means that there is no central pod and no central authority to govern the network, the project does not and cannot be aware of all Diaspora* installations. I've heard of and seen some company internal pods that the rest of the network never becomes aware of since the users on the pod don't (or cannot due to firewalls) share data outside their own pod. One list of pods, built from interactions by the pod maintainer, lists currently 101 Diaspora* pods https://diapod.net/active, of which over half are open for sign ups.

Some notable organizations having official Diaspora* accounts are Mozilla (fr), KDE community, Jolla, FairPhone, Loomio, LibreOffice Design, ownCloud and Kolab, to name a few.

4. What do you expect will be the main benefits of having BitNami packages available for Diaspora*?

Diaspora* is kind of tricky to install at the moment - well, before BitNami that is. We have well documented installation instructions for all major Linux platforms, but unfortunately following those still requires you are familiar with web applications and servers. With BitNami users who want to host their pod can do so easily without hassle, and that is great indeed. The best thing is that users have more choice now, and we will be striving to increase those choices.

We are glad Diaspora* is now part of BitNami. Would you like your favorite app to be part of BitNami? Be sure to suggest and vote for it in our contest!

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Meet DreamFactory CEO Bill Appleton and Learn About the First Mobile Development Platform on BitNami

Last week, we added the first mobile development platform to BitNami, DreamFactory. As with all BitNami apps, you can now download free, ready to run native installers for OS X and Linux, virtual machines and Azure and Amazon EC2 images for DreamFactory. You can also now launch a free cloud demo server with the BitNami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the launch button below.




Bill Appleton, CEO of DreamFactory, was kind enough to answer some questions for us:

1. Tell us a little about DreamFactory and how you got started with service platforms.


I wrote some of the very first service-based applications back in 1999 with XML-RPC and services from XMethods. After that, in 2002 we built client applications with SOAP on the Hailstorm platform from Microsoft. The Salesforce.com API was available by 2004, and I wrote some of the first AppExchange applications, many of which are still popular today. When AWS and Azure came out our engineering team started to write custom service platforms for various customers.

The use of REST APIs was clearly a critical technology for mobile, and so about three or four years ago we decided to take all of this experience and build the world’s best cloud service platform as an open source project. We launched earlier this summer and are really encouraged by the large number of developers who have adopted DreamFactory.

2. Will you please tell us about the DreamFactory Services Platform and how it enables mobile application development?

The DreamFactory Services Platform is an open source software package that provides everything an enterprise developer needs on the backend to develop HTML5 or native mobile applications, and to deploy those apps into production. We provide a complete set of services for SQL data, NoSQL data, and file storage. There are comprehensive user management capabilities, including roles and permissions, single sign-on, password management, OAuth, and LDAP support. DreamFactory also allows you to quickly and securely connect to external services like MongoDB, DynamoDB, S3, Azure Tables, Box and Salesforce.

We have an HTML5 Admin Console that makes it easy to set up the backend server. All of the various services are exposed through a comprehensive REST API that delivers JSON or XML documents. These services can be called directly from HTML5 or a native mobile application. Developers can focus on building great mobile experiences instead of writing a bunch of server-side code to expose data and files, handle security, authenticate users, and so forth. We’re super excited about this new development paradigm for mobile, where the backend consists of easily configurable services that are automatically exposed to mobile apps with REST.

3. What are some of your favorite features of DreamFactory?

Whenever you hook up a new service on the backend some pretty amazing things happen. First, the new service automatically appears on the Live API interface. This lets you see the various URL parameters and interact with the request and response. Next, the service is added to the SDK Documentation, which provides a hard copy for reference. Lastly, the service shows up in a dynamically generated JavaScript object at runtime. An HTML5 developer can just use this object to write an application, the REST interface is handled automatically. You can literally hook up a new service like MongoDB and start making calls to the database moments later.

Another thing people like is that this is an open source software package. You can manage your own applications with your own cloud server or on premises. You can use the management, deployment, and security practices that you are already using. We make it easy to move from our Free Hosting to your own cloud, or from dev to test to production. You don’t have to trust us to host your application, or worry about how we manage our data center, etc. And if a developer needs to do something extraordinary on the backend, they can customize our open source package as a starting point.

4. Which projects or organizations are using DreamFactory currently?  What kind of projects do they use it for?

The great thing about services is that you can use them in so many different ways. The rapid shift to mobile apps in the enterprise is the biggest driver of a services approach to app development. We believe that backend services exposed with REST and JSON is really the only good way to develop world-class mobile applications. And services are like building blocks -- highly configurable and easy to selectively expose to different applications and users. This reusability is key because it lets developers spend their time building apps, not dealing with complex backend development.

So we have a diverse group of customers using DreamFactory. For example, we have a large enterprise customer that uses DreamFactory to communicate between headquarters and retail. This is a global implementation in different data centers where DreamFactory is installed in their regional data centers.

We have seen some successful engagements using Sencha that work on desktop, tablet, and phone. That really demonstrates the “any device” promise of HTML5.

We also work great for native applications. One customer built a really nice bug tracking application for use on iOS devices. For that app, DreamFactory provides user management and a collaborative database for bug tracking.

You can use services in unique ways beyond mobile applications too. One of our customers is using DreamFactory as a backend for industrial process control devices for cloud storage, control, and monitoring.

Lastly, we work very nicely just for plain old website building. We have seen some nice desktop apps that also use services.

5. What do you expect will be the main benefits of having BitNami packages available for DreamFactory?

We started out trying to build all the various packages for different marketplaces. Some of our best engineers were spending lots of time on this work. Ultimately we decided that we didn’t want to be in the business of managing marketplaces and creating installers. We wanted to focus on our platform.

So working with BitNami makes perfect sense. You can go to the AWS, Azure, or VMware marketplaces and find our BitNami package, or you can just go to the BitNami website and see everything. They make the install easy for desktop or cloud. BitNami is a trusted source for these IaaS packages.

6. Can you share any of the DreamFactory roadmap? Which features can users look forward to over the coming year?

On the open source platform, we have some nice capabilities in the works. You will see the ability to add custom business logic with server-side scripting for situations that are not covered by the standard services. We are packaging our HTML5 client for use with PhoneGap. This will allow an enterprise to brand the wrapped client and instantly deploy applications right there. The applications will share platform data, and everything is controlled with user roles and permissions.


Our Enterprise Version will be available early next year. This will include the ability to run and manage multiple instances of DreamFactory on a single VM. We will have some important features like Active Directory support. The Enterprise Version will provide reporting on usage statistics by device as well as uptime monitoring and alerts.

Thanks to Bill for sharing his vision and plans for the DreamFactory Services Platform!

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

TYPO3, the enterprise-class Open Source CMS

We released the TYPO3 content management system in BitNami a month ago, as a result of our community contest.

You can download free, ready to run native installers for Windows, OS X and Linux, virtual machines and Azure and Amazon EC2 images. You can also now launch a free cloud demo server with the BitNami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the launch button below.


Ben van 't Ende, the TYPO3 community manager, was kind enough to answer some questions for those of you who may not be familiar with the project.


1. What is the goal of the TYPO3 application?

TYPO3 is an enterprise-class, Open Source CMS (Content Management System), used internationally to build and manage websites of all types, from small sites for non-profits to multilingual enterprise
solutions for large corporations.

http://typo3.org/about/typo3-the-cms/

2. What are some of the main features of TYPO3?

- Powerful extension framework. With the API-based framework in TYPO3, you can quickly extend your own website using best practices.
- Large extension repository. There are thousands of extensions from the community available for forms, newsfeeds, blogs, and much more.
- Multilingual. The backend supports more than 30 languages, and the frontend can support as many languages as you need through localization.
- Multi-site management. With one central TYPO3 installation, you can setup and manage multiple sites that can share users, extensions and more.
- Granular permissions control. TYPO3 allows for individual user or group rights for entire websites, individual pages, subdomains, or even for extensions and specific content elements.
- Extensive documentation. TYPO3 already has a large library of online documentation, tutorial videos, and books available in multiple languages.

More on: http://typo3.org/about/features/

TYPO3 welcome page

3. Which projects or organizations are using TYPO3 currently?  What kind of projects do they use it for?

TYPO3 is largely used in enterprise environments, municipalities and large-scale universities. These companies use TYPO3:

    - WWF
    - Deutsche Bank
    - Lufthansa
    - Airbus
    - Airfrance
    - Grundig
    - WWF
    - Sony Entertainment
    - American Express
    - Vodafone
    - Unesco
    - Amnesty International
    - Tamron
    - Pentax
    - FAO
    - Greenpeace
    - and many more http://t3blog.com


4. What do you expect will be the main benefits of having BitNami packages available for TYPO3?

Having TYPO3 CMS available as a BitNami app offers an easy way for new users to discover the feature set and opportunities with TYPO3 on the one hand, but on the other hand it also supports experienced web-developers in terms of easy prototyping on a flexible and scalable infrastructure in addition. The cloud functionality is perfect to launch new website campaigns on the fly in combination with the various extensions and tools that are available and ready to use for TYPO3 CMS.


We are glad TYPO3 is now part of BitNami. Would you like your favorite app to be part of BitNami? Be sure to suggest and vote for it in our contest!

Thursday, November 14, 2013

MEAN stack for BitNami: MongoDB, Express, AngularJS & NodeJS

http://bitnami.com/stack/mean

We are glad to announce that MEAN stack has been released as part of the BitNami Library! The MEAN acronym was introduced by Valeri Karpov from the MongoDB team in this blog post and stands for MongoDB NoSQL database, Express, AngularJS and NodeJS.


In addition to these components, the stack also ships some useful development tools:
  • - Apache
  • - MongooseJS
  • - Bower
  • - Git
  • - RockMongo, a MongoDB web administration tool (optional, will automatically install PHP as well)
BitNami MEAN stack is available for free from the BitNami app store as a native installer or virtual machine for local development, or as a cloud template for the Amazon and Windows Azure cloud computing platforms.

BitNami MEAN stack installer welcome
BitNami MEAN stack installation

Once the installation process has been completed, you can access the welcome page from your browser at http://localhost on Windows or http://localhost:8080 on OS X or Linux. If you have enabled RockMongo during the installation you can also manage your MongoDB from this web application.


BitNami MEAN stack welcome screen
RockMongo, MongoDB administration tool

Because BitNami MEAN stack is self-contained, it runs independently from the rest of the software or libraries installed on your system, and you will need to load specific environment variables. BitNami stacks ship a script that loads this environment for all platforms we support. Note that this applies mainly to native installers, not for Virtual Machines or cloud images.

For instance, you can create your first Express application running the following command from a Terminal:

$ ./use_meanstack
$ express testapp

Now you can deploy your your first Express application.

$ cd testapp
$ node app

The following sample application uses the MongoDB driver for Node.js. You can clone this project from GitHub repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/vkarpov15/mean-stack-todo

Then edit the "app.js" file to change the default MongoDB connection. This example uses the "admin" database and the "root" user.

var db = Mongoose.createConnection('mongodb://root:PASSWORD@localhost/admin');

Then, check that MongoDB is already running in the graphical manager tool and start the sample application:

$ node app

You can see something similar to this at http://localhost:3000

MEAN sample application

We documented more details and more features of MEAN in our Quick Start Guide. Do you have questions? We will be happy to help you at our community forum!

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Develop Mobile Apps with DreamFactory, the Newest Member of the BitNami Family


We are thrilled to welcome the DreamFactory Services Platform to the BitNami App Library. DreamFactory is the first app we have added to BitNami that enables mobile application development. More than that, DreamFactory actually provides a complete mobile application development platform. With the DreamFactory BitNami Stack, you can be up, running and ready to build your own mobile app in minutes on a local machine or in the cloud. You can even get a near-instant free one hour demo server to check out DreamFactory by clicking on the following:


Here's a little more on DreamFactory from co-founder and CEO Bill Appleton:

"DreamFactory simplifies mobile application development by making it easier for developers to add backend services to mobile applications without writing server code and APIs. An exceptional user experience has been center to our strategy and we couldn’t be more pleased to partner with the world’s leading cloud-based app store for developers to simplify and accelerate the DreamFactory install and launch process."

As with all BitNami apps, you can get free installers and virtual appliances for local deployments or cloud templates for Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure for cloud deployments. To run DreamFactory in the cloud and get automatic backups, monitoring and more, sign up for a free BitNami Cloud Hosting account.

To learn more about the DreamFactory Services Platform, visit the DreamFactory site.

Saturday, November 9, 2013

Security issue with older versions of PHP

Older versions of Bitnami applications containing PHP versions 5.3.x before 5.3.12 and 5.4.x before 5.4.2 are vulnerable and susceptible to attacks via remote code execution. These are older versions, released more than 18 months ago. We have released updated versions since then but a percentage of our users are still running these vulnerable versions. 

It is important that you fix or upgrade your website if you are one of them. We have been reaching out to users that we have contact information for, both directly and through our hosting partners. If you have not heard from us, and are running a publicly accessible PHP stack that is more than 18 months old, please visit the following page for information on how to protect or fix your installation:





Friday, November 8, 2013

The State of Cloud Adoption in 2013

The BitNami app store drives more than 1 MM new installations a month of popular server software, both locally and in the cloud. This gives us a privileged position to understand how developers and end-users adopt new technology in general and, in particular, the cloud. We recently conducted a survey of our registered users, both to collect feedback on how they are using BitNami to understand the importance that the cloud will play in how they run business and server applications moving forward.

As of this writing, more than 4,000 people have completed the survey. Because of the large number of responses and because BitNami is agnostic to deployment environments (we support all major server/desktop operating systems, VMware virtual environments and leading cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure), we believe that the results are representative of how organizations are beginning to deploy applications in public and private cloud environments. As such, we wanted to share the results with our community.

To give the results some context, we will first share a little about the people who responded to the survey and how they use BitNami. Then, we will dive right into their use of the cloud.

What best describes you?
(more than one answer allowed)


Commentary: While the majority of BitNami users identify themselves as being in a technical role, there were considerable replies from students, who often utilize BitNami to learn new applications, programming languages or deployment environments; and from business users, who often utilize BitNami to run business-critical applications such as Alfresco, JasperSoft, SugarCRM and others, often without the benefit of internal IT support, either because it doesn’t yet exist or due to a lack of IT bandwidth to support their immediate application needs.

How do you use BitNami?
(more than one answer allowed)


Commentary: As you can see, there are three common scenarios for using BitNami: 1) to quickly deploy an application or development stack in order to learn a new application or programming language, or experiment with a new deployment environment; 2) to quickly launch a development environment to build applications; and 3) to run business-critical applications in the deployment environment that makes the most sense for a given situation.

Where do you host your applications?


Commentary: While local deployments (e.g. on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) are still the most popular for development environments, it’s clear that BitNami users develop, test, deploy and run applications in a wide range of environments. It’s also clear that most organizations utilize multiple environments.

How would you describe your organization’s adoption of cloud applications during the past 12 months?


Commentary: These results are for the full set of respondents. Based on the results, it appears that more than 71% of organizations have run applications in the cloud during the past 12 months, with more than 41% increasing the number of cloud applications. Less than 29% of respondents claim that their organizations do not currently deploy applications to the cloud.

Among Business Users (SMB and Enterprise)


Commentary: Among respondents that identify themselves as business users (both in SMBs and Enterprises), there has been an even higher rate of cloud application adoption during the past twelve months.


Among Technical Users


Commentary: Among respondents that identify themselves as technical in nature (open source project developers, developers, systems administrators and IT consultants), the rate of cloud application adoption for the past twelve months is slightly less but still above the average. This is likely due to the fact that students, the other major category of users, select local downloads at a higher rate than the norm.


Among Organizations >1,000 Employees



Commentary: Larger organizations (with 1,000 employees or more) have adopted cloud applications at a slightly slower rate compared to the norm.


How would you describe your organization’s cloud adoption strategy for the next 12 months?


Commentary: The results show growing momentum for the adoption of cloud applications, as more than 55% of respondents stated that their companies intend to use more applications in the cloud over the next twelve months. Similarly, the percentage of companies that do not use (or do not plan to use) applications in the cloud declined from 28% during the last twelve months to less than 19% for the next twelve months.

Among Business Users


Commentary: Among respondents that identify themselves as business users, the rate of adoption is increasing ever higher than normal as more than 61% of business user respondents expect their companies to increase the use of cloud applications during the next twelve months (as compared to 55% for the norm).


Among Technical Users


Commentary: The rate of increase is less among technical users although the numbers continue to show high rates of adoption of cloud applications.


Among Organizations >1,000 Employees


Commentary: Company size is less of a variable when looking into the future as more than 50% of respondents from virtually every company size expect their companies to increase their use of cloud applications over the next twelve months.


Over the next 12 months, where do you expect your cloud applications will be deployed?


Commentary: Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to be the most popular cloud environment for BitNami users, with nearly 39% of all respondents stating that they expect their companies to deploy applications there over the next twelve months. Private clouds are the second most common deployment option followed by Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, VMware Cloud and Rackspace.

It is important to note that BitNami Cloud Hosting is not actually a distinct cloud hosting platform but rather a set of tools and services for rapidly deploying, managing and monitoring BitNami applications in public cloud environments such as AWS and Microsoft Azure.


Among Business Users


Commentary: Among business users, there is a slightly higher adoption of AWS, private clouds and Rackspace for deploying cloud applications.

Among Technical Users


Commentary: Among technical users, there is very little difference in the cloud platforms of choice compared to the new.

Among Organizations >1,000 Employees


Commentary: Among larger organizations, there are significantly more that are adopting private clouds (39% vs. 27% for all company sizes). There is also a higher adoption rate of Microsoft Azure and VMware Cloud. Conversely, there is less overall adoption of AWS and Google Compute Engine.


What are the primary reasons why your organization is, or is not, moving more applications to the cloud?

There were a wide range of responses to this open-ended question. Among the most popular reasons why organizations are planning to move more applications to the cloud were:

      Cost savings
      Scalability
      Accessibility (including Mobility)
      Reliability
      Time savings

Among the most common reasons given why organizations are NOT planning to move more applications to the cloud were:

      Security
      Privacy and data sensitivity
      Availability
      Cost
      Loss of IT control

We would like to thank the over 3,800 registered BitNami users who took the time to answer our survey questions. Without your cooperation, this analysis of cloud application adoption wouldn’t be possible.

It is our intention to conduct similar surveys in the future and we will share the results with our community so that you have a better understanding of what your peers are doing and what technologies (applications and their supporting platforms) are leading the adoption curve.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

To learn more about BitNami Cloud Hosting, please visit bitnami.com/cloud.