Friday, October 31, 2014

Bitnami is Now on Google Cloud Platform



After working closely with the Google team, we’re thrilled to announce that Bitnami now supports Google Cloud Platform! As of today, all Bitnami apps may now be deployed with the one-click simplicity you’re used to on the Bitnami Launchpad for Google Cloud Platform. The Launchpad provides a simple interface for launching any of the over 100 applications now available on Bitnami - for free!

The video below shows just how easy it is to launch a Bitnami app on Google Compute Engine. Select from one of our developer environments, such as Rails, Node, Django or LAMP, or our huge range of apps - from WordPress and Drupal to Redmine and Jenkins to Discourse and eXo, and many others. Just visit the Launchpad to view the complete list of apps, click on the one you’d like to launch and we walk you through the simple process from there.




Try this out today with the Google Cloud Platform free trial --you can check out just how quickly you can spin up apps with Bitnami on Google Cloud Platform free of charge.

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Meet Bitnami at AWS re:Invent 2014

After a great show last year, we are excited to be sponsoring this year's AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas from Novemeber 11th to November 14th. Our team can't wait to share why so many AWS users choose Bitnami to power over 10 million hours of AWS usage every month!

This event is sold out, so come to our booth (#325) early to grab one of our popular Bitnami shirts before they are all gone.

This year, we will also be participating in the AWS re:Invent Partner Passport event. Meet up with Bitnami and our partners, TIBCO Jaspersoft, MongoLab, NuoDB, and MapR. Stop by our booths for a chance to win prizes, and meet up for a drink at the pub crawl at Zeffirino's, free to AWS re:Invent attendees.

Don't wait until the conference to try Bitnami. Check out Bitnami Cloud Hosting for the easiest way to deploy sever apps to the Amazon Web Services cloud!

Pimcore added to Bitnami Library!

Pimcore is the latest winner of the Bitnami monthly packaging contest and we are happy to announce that it is now available as part of the Bitnami library.


Pimcore is a free and open-source web content management platform for creating and managing web applications and digital presences. The Pimcore platform contains various integrated applications for web content management, product information management, multi-channel publishing, e-commerce and various other marketing-specific applications.

Thanks to their efforts in encouraging their community to vote during the Bitnami contest, Pimcore is now ready to install in a few clicks with the Bitnami Pimcore installers (available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X), Virtual Machine images(VMs), cloud images for the Amazon EC2 and Azure cloud platforms.

If you want to quickly check out Pimcore, you can launch a free cloud demo server. By clicking the button below, you will have your own Pimcore instance running for 1 hour, for free!


We also had the opportunity to interview Dietmar Rietsch, CEO/Co-Founder of the project, who was kind enough to answer some of our questions:

What is the goal of the Pimcore application?

The vision of pimcore is to manage and integrate any digital information within an open-source enterprise suite.

What are some of the features of Pimcore?

Pimcore is the first and premier open-source multi-channel experience and engagement management platform. It features web content management, digital asset management, product information management, e-commerce and multi-channel-publishing in an integrated open-source suite.

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

Pimcore is currently used within approximately 80k different organizations. Those organizations and companies use pimcore for a variety of different project types. For example they use pimcore for their master data management initiatives, managing their international central product data, their digital assets and of course their e-business processes like B2B e-commerce. In most cases pimcore is used for managing whole digital presences.

What do you expect will be the main benefits of having Bitnami packages available for Pimcore?

Cloud deployment is a critical feature for any application. Being quickly and efficiently able to deploy pimcore in the cloud is therefore a very important aspect for pimcore and the pimcore community. So, big thanks to Bitnami for providing an outstanding pimcore stack for the cloud.


Would you like your favorite app to be part of Bitnami? Be sure to suggest and vote for it in our monthly contest!

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Bitnami Open Source Leaders Interview Series: Francisco Mancardi from TestLink


Within one application, TestLink leads the way for software quality assurance by offering all of the tools needed for test plan management. As part of our Open Source Leader podcast series, we interviewed Francisco Mancardi, Project Leader of TestLink, to learn how TestLink helps people manage tests and where they will be going from here.

The topics below are covered in the interview:
  • What is TestLink?
  • Is TestLink only for software testing?
  • Who uses TestLink?
  • How can one be involved in the TestLink Community?
  • What should we expect from the next versions of TestLink?
After learning more about the project, you can launch TestLink to the cloud or deploy it locally with free installers, virtual machines and cloud templates from BitnamiGet started in the cloud for free with a $200 credit from Microsoft Azure.

            

Stuart Langridge:       These are the Bitnami Open Source Leaders Series of interviews.  I’m Stuart Langridge and I’m talking to Francisco Mancardi, who is the project leader of the TestLink project.  Hi, Francisco.

Francisco Mancardi:  Hello, how are you?

Stuart Langridge:       It’s all fun and games here. So, tell us a little bit about TestLink.  What is it?

Francisco Mancardi:  TestLink is a test and requirements management application. In an ideal world, testing is pretty straightforward, but normally it doesn’t happen that way. I think that an application like this can improve how people can manage case-testing processes a lot. Testing, in my opinion, is the weakest part of the delivery process. Normally people tend not to use a tool, and try to use spreadsheets. With Testlink, you can describe the artifact you plan to test and describe it’s characteristics.

You can also create requirements, create versions of the artifact you want to test, and get reports as well. TestLink should ideally be used for manual testing. We also offer an API to connect with other systems, which allows TestLink to get results from other systems. However, it is not able to run automatic tests on other systems. Also, TestLink has integrations with the most popular issue-tracker systems such as Jira, Mantis, and Mozilla. That is what TestLink is today, more or less.

Stuart Langridge:       So, TestLink isn’t a system for actually running your tests.  It’s a system to manage which tests should be run, and which tests go with which modules?

Francisco Mancardi:  Yes.

Stuart Langridge:       Interesting.

Francisco Mancardi:  Instead of buying Excel and start typing there, where you have no versioning, you are not able to manage other integration with other systems, you can simply start TestLink in it’s own application, and write as much or as little as you want. Normally, I just write the name of the test and start adding more details if I have time. You aren’t forced to describe a lot of things on your test, and you have the ability to change what you want. Also, you can use it in your Excel versions.

Stuart Langridge:       Obviously the people who mostly use TestLink and test-management software are generally QA, but QA in which areas?  Do you know what type of companies are currently using TestLink, and what kind of companies/organizations you would like to see using TestLink?

Francisco Mancardi:  I have informal data regarding what kind of companies use TestLink. I normally get this information from the channels that we use to communicate with people, such as forums. From this, I can look at the company email to get an idea of which companies are using TestLink. I see people from – I know that people from Philips and Netherlands are using TestLink. Some examples are IT companies, insurance companies, and banks. I supposed they always happen to have a lot of IT. I think that other kinds of activities, like biology test labs, could also use this product. I need to create, in my opinion, some new scales or proof of concepts in order to show more people that they may be able to use TestLink to create these tests.

Stuart Langridge:       TestLink doesn’t have to manage just software tests, it could be any kind of testing at all?

Francisco Mancardi:  Yes, and that is what we are really seeing. Suppose you want to test your car before going on a holiday. The test is primarily, in my opinion, a checklist with certain characteristics of something you want to test. This can be a chair, an oven, or anything that you need to test. The reason you test is to see if it works, and if it does you may need to describe it. For example, you need to test the timer on the oven to make sure it is working as you expect, you could use TestLink for that. There is nothing specific that forces TestLink to be used only for testing software.

                                    If you look to the logo, you can see that it looks like something from a crash testing sight, with the same concept and same colors. The idea for TestLink is that it supports something to test, but not necessary a piece of software. I can describe parts I want to test, how to test it, and record results of my experience for anything.

Stuart Langridge:       If someone has decided to use TestLink and they want to start setting it up, obviously they will need to install TestLink initially. What’s the easiest way to do that, and how much technical knowledge do you need to run TestLink?

Francisco Mancardi:  I think the best thing to do is to get an Installer or Virtual Machine from Bitnami, it is an easy way to start. If you don’t want to do this, you can download from SourceForge. The technical knowledge is, in my opinion, not too high. You need to understand how to change a permission on a file, how to connect using a secret client to a MySQL server, and how to start or stop an Apache server.  But surely if you want to start right away, you should install a Bitnami installer because you get everything you need. You get the database and a web server all in one installer.  

Stuart Langridge:       There are obviously people using TestLink within their organization, and some people will be deploying it to the cloud. Do you expect cloud usage to increase in the future?

Francisco Mancardi:  The cloud will be the future because people do not want to manage this solution on some server. For example, I am always talking about Bitnami because I have had a good experience with them. If you want just to test TestLink, you can launch a server on Bitnami for an hour and without any effort you can test TestLink, or any other of applications that Bitnami is offering. I think the cloud is the way to go if you don’t want to worry about your servers.

Stuart Langridge:       TestLink is a Web-based application. Do you tend to work with mainly modern browsers or mainly with mobile? Are you trying to support old versions of Internet Explorer 6? What do you expect the users of TestLink will be using?

Francisco Mancardi:  I expect that people aren’t using Internet Explorer 6, 7 or 8 because it has a lot of compatibility issues. Since the development team is small, it’s very difficult to be able to test – to be sure that TestLink has no issues with the different browsers. That being said, I don’t have a problem telling users to run on different servers – from different browsers. I normally test on Chrome and Firefox, and not much on Internet Explorer just because I’m using Linux as my development platform.

Stuart Langridge:       How often does TestLink release?  What’s the release strategy and the release cadence?

Francisco Mancardi:  During the last few years, I have tried to increase the release pace of TestLink, and we can say that we have four releases in a year normally. These releases include bug fixes and new features.  In the last two years we have no big-bang features, but people have been requesting a lot. As an example, many people were requesting to record the execution results of step levels. Finally this year, I was able to release it because a German company had provided support with the development. It is really great when people support us like that because it makes it easier to release a new thing.

Stuart Langridge:       Do you do time-based releases or feature-based releases?  When you say that you release four times a year, do you mean that four times a year you say, “Okay, the development version of TestLink is now TestLink 1.9.2”?

Francisco Mancardi:  It is normally time-based because if TestLink has bugs, and we need to provide fixes to the people. Aside from the releases, if there are some features that I consider important enough, I will release before the preplanned date.

Stuart Langridge:       How do upgrades work?  If I’m running the current version of TestLink and a new release happens, how do I upgrade to it? Can I stay on the version I’m on and stay supported, or do I have to be running the most recent version?

Francisco Mancardi:  During the last year, I chose not to support a very automated upgrade process because it’s very time-consuming to develop this kind of approach. Also, in the past years, the changes normally had a big impact on the databases. Since the updates have been very small in the last years, I currently provide an upgrade manually.

Normally, an upgrade consists of taking a couple older VMs and installing new ones, or you can just install a new Bitnami installer. Another option is to download the latest release from SourceForge, by installing TestLink in another folder and applying two or three SQL scripts to the database.

Regarding the older releases, I try to only maintain releases that are not older than a year because changes on code require a lot of work to maintain newer versions. Version 1.8 is not supported anymore, and currently you can run 1.9.9 or 1.9.10. We don’t support the other versions due to bug fixes and features that are no longer there.

Stuart Langridge:       So, TestLink is currently in the high 1.9 versions. What are your upcoming plans for TestLink?  Is there going to be a TestLink 2.0? Are you planning on working on the 1.9 series, and what will happen in new versions?

Francisco Mancardi:  The development on Version 2.0 has stopped because it was very difficult to maintain two parallels between 1.9 and 2.0. I have tried to work backward by going from 2.0 to 1.9, and suppose that the new features of TestLink would be a 1.9 branch. I don’t know when I’m planning to change to 2.0, but I need to consider what kind of future I can afford. 2.0 is going to be beneath it, and the new 2.0 will be an evolution of 1.9.

Stuart Langridge:       What things are you planning on working on next, improvements to the reports or improvements to the GUI?  Is that the kind of area that you’d expect TestLink to change in?

Francisco Mancardi:  I think the reports area needs more work because people like to have the Word or OpenOffice format. Currently they have provided us with a kind of fake OpenOffice or fake Word, and I have a lot of issues with embedded images. That is one of the most important things we need to change, but also the GUI needs to be refreshed a lot. I don’t think we will be able to have a mobile version of the app, but we need to work on a mobile and responsive version of TestLink in order to be used from a PC tablet.

Stuart Langridge:       You obviously work quite closely with the TestLink community.  Is that community mostly people who work on TestLink itself, or people who use TestLink to manage tests in their own organization?

Francisco Mancardi:  There aren’t enough people that want to help to develop TestLink. I think our community has an interesting size because you have to consider that I have no download statistics from Bitnami. On SourceForge, we get more than 1,000 downloads a week. I think it’s a good figure because this kind of application isn’t the most popular as an issue tracker. As more and more people use TestLink, they improve things through ideas more than through development work. I like to have people help by writing tutorials or other documentation of a use case that can be useful for other people. One thing that TestLink lacks is documentation – we had written a user manual long time ago, and it was my choice to develop instead of documenting, which sometimes makes it a little difficult to use TestLink.

Stuart Langridge:       If someone wants to use TestLink, where should they go to try it out or if they want to ask questions?

Francisco Mancardi:  The main site is www.testlink.org, which has information about the last stable release and links to our other channels. For community help, the best place is forum.testlink.org. For issues, we have a Mantis installation, and a Twitter account that I use to inform people of things that are happening and nothing more. I don’t provide support via Twitter. Also, we have a LinkedIn group, but managing all these channels is very time-consuming. I suggest that people get a username for the forum if they need to ask for help between users. Also, they can get a username for Mantis, which will give them the ability to provide feature request and the option for us to help them with issues.

Stuart Langridge:       Excellent.  And so, thank you very much for talking to us, Francisco Mancardi of the TestLink project.

Francisco Mancardi:  Bye-bye.


[End of Audio]

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Bitnami Supports New Amazon Cloud Region in Germany




Amazon just announced the addition of another region for the Amazon Cloud. This new region, eu-central-1, is located in Germany! We have been working closely with Amazon previous to the launch and we are excited to announce that all of the applications on the Bitnami Library are available immediately for this new region. You can find the new AMIs in the Amazon catalog as well as in the cloud tab for each one of the apps in the Bitnami web site.

Support for the eu-central-1 region is also in the works for Bitnami Cloud Hosting and will be released shortly. Bitnami Cloud Hosting is a service that simplifies the process of deploying and managing the Bitnami library of applications and development environments in the cloud. It offers dynamic deployments, automatic backups, monitoring and other features that make it easier to run applications in the cloud. Check it out!

Friday, October 17, 2014

Akeneo added to Bitnami Library!

Akeneo is the latest winner of our monthly app contest, and is now part of the Bitnami Library! We are happy to announce that Akeneo is now available to download on Bitnami.

Akeneo is a Product Information Management (PIM) application designed to simplify your product management processes with a tool that helps centralize and harmonize all the technical and marketing information of your catalogs and products.

Thanks to their successful effort in encouraging their community to vote in the the Bitnami contest, Akeneo is now ready to install in a few clicks using the Bitnami installers, available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, Virtual Machine images (VMs) and cloud images for the Amazon EC2 and Azure clouds.
 
We also had  the opportunity to interview Frédéric de Gombert, CEO of Akeneo, who was kind enough to answer some questions about the project.

How was the Akeneo project started? What are the origins of this project?


The Akeneo journey really started in Las Vegas during the Magento Imagine Conference in May 2012. Yoav Kutner (former CTO & co-founder of Magento) and I were talking about what was really missing for merchants. We quickly agreed that CRM and PIM were major pain points for our clients. Not because there was no existing solution in the market but because those solutions were mostly closed-source, expensive and rarely designed for e-commerce needs. Six months later and with the help of a dream team including two other co-founders (Benoit & Nicolas), we were officially founding Akeneo. Our mission : building an open and intuitive PIM to help marketers struggling with spreadsheets and/or archaic tools. (Yoav also founded in the same time OroCRM but it's another story!)

What is the main goal for Akeneo?

At heart, Akeneo is an intuitive and super connected product information management software. But it is also a productivity tool : it means that our main goal is making product management much more efficient. Clients can centralize and push a product to a new channel much more quickly — on average, it takes 60 to 80 percent less time.

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

We currently have more than 7 000 live installations of Akeneo in the world. It's a good start considering that the first stable version has been released in March 2014. We have very various kind of customers : fashion or luxury brands like Lancaster or Charlotte Olympia, large retailers like Auchan (largest supermarket chain in Europe with more than 1 600 supermarkets in the world), real estate companies, manufacturers, ... Every company selling products - virtual or physical, online or offline -  can find a good usage of Akeneo!

What do you expect will be the main benefits of having Bitnami packages available for Akeneo?

Two main benefits : ease the installation and evaluation process of Akeneo for non technical users and help them to find an efficient and cost effective hosting solution if needed. 



Would you like your favorite app to be part of Bitnami? Be sure to suggest and vote for it in our monthly contest

Bitnami Open Source Leaders Interview Series: Sytse Sijbranij from GitLab



Gitlab leads by example with their passion for creating open source collaboration tools, with the ability to do everything on code. As part of our Open Source Leader podcast series, we interviewed Sytse Sijbranij, CEO of GitLab, to learn how they maintain their open source community and what will be next for their tools.

Below is a sample of the topics we covered:
  • Why Gitlab?
  • Who should use it?
  • What is the relationship between Gitlab and Github?
  • Where is the best place to run Gitlab?
  • How does the Gitlab community work? 
  • Where is is Gitlab going next? 
You can launch a GitLab application or stack to the cloud with Bitnami for free, or download any of our free native installers or VMs to run the software locally. Get started in the cloud for free with a $200 credit from Microsoft Azure.







Stuart Langridge:       This is the Binami Open Source Leaders Series of Interviews.  I’m Stuart Langridge, and I’m talking to Sytse Sijbranij of GitLab.


Sytse Sijbranij:            Hi Stuart thanks for having us.

Stuart Langridge:        No problem.  So Sytse, you’re CEO and co-founder of GitLab, yes?

Sytse Sijbranij:            Yes. That’s correct. 

Stuart Langridge:        So tell us, what is GitLab?  

Sytse Sijbranij:            GitLab is open source software to collaborate on code.  It means you can download a package, install it, and you’ll have version control, issue management, code reviews, a wiki, all ready to run within your organization.

Stuart Langridge:       So you could think of this essentially like a self-hosted version of GitHub, yes?

Sytse Sijbranij:           Exactly. 

Stuart Langridge:       Since we mentioned GitHub, the elephant in the room. Obviously there’s a big advantage in that I’m running it inside my organization, so it’s private if I want it to be.  If you look at this field there are an awful lot of different packaging attempts at this, both hosted, something like GitHub or LaunchPad. Talk about why GitLab’s better than the competition, what you do really well, and why people would want to go with you.

Thursday, October 16, 2014

Drupal security fix SA-CORE-2014-005


The Drupal project has just released a new version that fixes a highly critical issue: SA-CORE-2014-005A vulnerability in the Drupal 7 API allows an attacker to send specially crafted requests resulting in arbitrary SQL execution.


We have released BitNami Drupal 7.32 installers, virtual machines and Amazon EC2 images that fix this issue. We are continuing to work on upgrading other Drupal-based applications like CiviCRM and OpenAtrium.

You should patch your Drupal version as soon as possible. You can follow the step by step instructions at this blog post. Basically you will need to ssh to your machine, ssh to the Drupal installation directory and execute drush.

$ cd /opt/bitnami/apps/drupal/htdocs
$ drush up

If everything goes well you should see something similar to the following:

Project drupal was updated successfully. Installed version is now 7.32.
Backups were saved into the directory /home/bitnami/drush-backups/bitnami_drupal7/20141017020023/drupal.       [ok]
No database updates required                    [success]
'all' cache was cleared.                        [success]

Finished performing updates.                         [ok]

In case you were not familiar with Bitnami Drupal, it is a self-contained and easy to use distribution that makes it simple to start developing and deploying Drupal applications.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

POODLE SSL vulnerability (CVE-2014-3566)

A new vulnerability in the SSL protocol has been published today. Codenamed POODLE, it exploits a flaw in the design of SSL version 3.0. that allows the plaintext of secure connections to be calculated by a network attacker.

http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com.es/2014/10/this-poodle-bites-exploiting-ssl-30.html

Recent Bitnami stacks released in the last 6 months are NOT affected as the default, optimized configuration we use for SSL is not vulnerable. If you are running an older version of a Bitnami stack you may be vulnerable and need to change your configuration. You can learn more in our wiki page for this issue.

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Bitnami participates in the GitHub Student Developer Pack




The GitHub Student Developer Pack is a collection of developer tools made available to students free of charge. Students enrolled in degree granting programs at all levels will be eligible to sign up for this pack to get free GitHub Micro accounts with 5 private repositories. Besides that, those students will have free access to an entire suite of useful developer tools from selected companies.


Since this program is intended to give students free access to the best developer tools, we're happy to announce that Bitnami is participating; when signing up for the GitHub Student Developer Pack, students will have free access to the Business 3 plan in Bitnami Cloud Hosting for a year - a $588 value! This plan allows users to launch and manage up to 3 cloud servers on the Amazon Cloud (AWS) from Bitnami's library of close to 100 applications and development stacks. This means that students can get a fully-configured and ready to use development environment for LAMP, Django, Ruby on Rails or Node.js, or apps such as Redmine, Jenkins, Drupal, TestLink and more up and running in just a few clicks in the cloud!

To learn more and sign up for the GitHub Student Developer Pack, you can visit this link.