Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Security Issue: GHOST buffer overflow CVE-2015-0235

A remotely-exploitable glibc security issue affecting common versions of Linux distributions has been recently disclosed. You can find additional information on how to upgrade your Bitnami installations in our wiki page covering the issue

Friday, January 23, 2015

2nd Bitnami Cloud Bootcamp - February 2015

We held our first Bitnami Cloud Bootcamp in September 2014. The interest surpassed all of our expectations and the bootcamp itself was a success, covering a wide variety of technologies and attracting a diverse group of talented individuals. After the training, we invited six of them join the Bitnami team and they are responsible for many of the recent application releases in Bitnami.

As promised, we are excited to announce the 2nd Bitnami Cloud Bootcamp! Bitnami bootcamps are fast-paced, in-person training courses that provide you with the knowledge and practical skills you need to automate the installation and management of server software in the cloud. You will learn directly from developers and system administrators responsible for systems that manage tens of thousands of servers. At the end of the course, if you have performed well, we will make you a job offer to join Bitnami. In other words, if you are located in Spain and passionate about Linux, Open Source and Cloud you should seriously consider applying.

The original bootcamp was 4 weeks long and that limited the amount of candidates that could attend, so we have decided to change the format this time around and run a 2 weeks Bootcamp. This way, currently employed attendees may be able to take vacation time in order to attend the training. Depending on how this experiment turns out we may be go back to the original format or run smaller, more frequent bootcamps.

This Bootcamp will run from February 16th to the 27th, this time at our office in Seville, rather than a third-party training facility. In the last few months, we have tripled the size of our office and have everything in place to conduct the bootcamp, including space, connectivity and snacks :)

Of course, since we are running the Bootcamp for a shorter period of time, we have also limited the scope of what we will teach in the course while still covering all the important areas. For example, while the original bootcamp covered Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Azure, in this edition we will only cover Amazon Web Services because the concepts are similar across all major cloud platforms.

For this edition we will require applicants to have a working knowledge of Linux. Though we covered the basics in our previous one, the candidates that were not already familiar with Linux had a harder time following along and the more experienced participants did not get as much out of it. A good, free, online introduction to Linux is offered by the Linux Foundation in partnership with edX. Please make sure you attend the course (or already have the knowledge described in it) before applying.

For more information and to apply for this edition, please visit our bootcamp page.



Thursday, January 22, 2015

Welcome Kafka to the Bitnami Launchpad for Google Cloud Platform!

We are happy to introduce Kafka as part of the Bitnami library for the Google Cloud Platform!

Kafka has created a new way to use a distributed commit log. With its unique design, Kafka also provides the functionality of a messaging system.

Kafka is fast, scalable, durable and distributed by design. Some of Kafka's most popular uses include:
  • Messaging
  • Website Activity Tracking
  • Metrics
  • Log Aggregation
  • Stream Processing
  • Event Sourcing
  • Commit Log
There are a lot of tools that integrate with Kafka as well, such as stream processing systems, Hadoop integration, monitoring, and deployment tools.


You can check out all of these features by simply deploying Kafka with one-click on the Bitnami Launchpad for Google Cloud Platform. Click the button below to get started. 



Want to get started with Kafka right now? Run the commands below from your Terminal to publish and collect your first message:
  • This command will declare a new topic. Kafka server is configured to use the server public IP address:
$ kafka/bin/kafka-topics.sh --create --zookeeper 127.0.0.1:2181 --replication-factor 1 --partitions 1 --topic test

We use --replication-factor to indicate how many servers we are going to have a copy of the logs and --partition to choose the number of partitions for the topic we are creating.
  • This one starts a new producer in the same server itself:
$ kafka/bin/kafka-console-producer.sh --broker-list PUBLIC_IP:9092 --topic test
this is my first message


  • And finally you can collect your first message in the consumer:
$ kafka/bin/kafka-console-consumer.sh --zookeeper 127.0.0.1:2181 --topic test --from-beginning
this is my first message


If you want to know more about how to use Bitnami’s Kafka, you can read our wiki page. Still have questions? We would be happy to answer them on our community forum

Friday, January 16, 2015

The simplest way to use Amazon's new instance type!

This week AWS announced new compute-optimized C4 instance types. Since then, we've been busy migrating some of our internal infrastructure to take advantage of the increased power available in the C4 instances, specifically the c4.2xlarge instance type.

You can read their full post here:

"The new C4 instances are based on the Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 (code name Haswell) processor. This custom processor, optimized for EC2, runs at a base speed of 2.9 GHz, and can achieve clock speeds as high as 3.5 GHz with Intel® Turbo Boost" 

We were excited about the new instances and knew you would be too, which is why we added support for C4 to Bitnami Cloud Hosting as well. Continuous integration servers such as Jenkins or GitLab CI are a good match for these new instance types. Want to get started in just a few clicks? Learn how with our step-by-step guide below.

If you don’t already have a Bitnami Cloud Hosting account be sure to sign up before getting started, and add your AWS credentials here: https://app.bitnamihosting.com/clouds.

The Simplest Way to Use C4 Instances on Bitnami Cloud Hosting:

First, create a new server on your Bitnami Cloud Hosting Console

Then, choose your application. In this case, we chose Jenkins. 



Next, you'll want to change your operating system to "Amazon Linux 2014.09.1 (rev. 36, hvm)"


Finally, choose your server type as "C4 Extra Large"

And there you have it - your very own Jenkins server running on a C4 instance. Try it today! 

If you have any questions, head to Bitnami's community page to start a discussion or engage with peers. Or read the full post from AWS here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-new-c4-instances/ 

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

New Bitnami Ruby Stack with Ruby 2.2.0 and Rails 4.2.0

We are happy to announce that we have just released the Bitnami Ruby Stack with Ruby 2.2.0 and Rails 4.2.0. It is completely self-contained and will not conflict with your current development environment. You can download it, give it a try and safely remove it when you are done.

If you are not familiar with the Bitnami Ruby Stack, it is a free package that simplifies the development and deployment of Ruby on Rails applications. This version includes ready-to-run versions of Apache 2.4.10, MySQL 5.5.40, PostgreSQL 9.3.5, Ruby 2.2.0 and Rails 4.2.0. It also includes RVM, NGINX, Passenger, Git, Redis, Node.js and all required dependencies.

Bitnami Ruby Stack can be deployed using all-in-one free native installers (for Linux and Mac OS X), virtual machines and the most popular public cloud providers: Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine.
The main changes in the new Ruby 2.2.0 are the following:
  • Ruby’s Garbage Collector is now able to collect Symbol type objects. This reduces memory usage of Symbols
  • Experimental support for using vfork(2) with system() and spawn() have also been added. This could potentially bring huge speed-up when a large process executes external commands many times
  • Additional option for configure.in to use jemalloc. This feature is still experimental and currently deactivated by default
This version includes new features and improvements but it has a few compatibility issues as well. You can find a list of changes in the Ruby repository.

Get started with Ruby on Rails with Bitnami Ruby Stack 2.2.0 in your local machine or in the cloud now!

Friday, January 9, 2015

Elasticsearch added to Bitnami Library!

We are happy to announce that Elasticsearch is now available on the Bitnami library!

Elasticsearch is an open source real-time search and analytics engine. It is intended for use in distributed environments where reliability and scalability are critical. Almost any action can be performed using a simple RESTful API using JSON over HTTP. 


Elasticsearch is now ready to install in a few clicks with the Bitnami Elasticsearch Installers (available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X), Virtual Machine images(VMs), cloud images for Amazon EC2, Azure and Google Cloud Platform

We also ship Elasticsearch-head, which is an open source plugin that provides a web front-end for managing your Elasticsearch cluster.

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


Don't forget to visit our wiki to learn how to manage your installation. Still have questions? We would be happy to answer them on our community forum.

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

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Bitnami Open Source Leaders Interview Series: Siobhan McKeown from WordPress

If you want to get started with blogging or website creation, WordPress is a great way to go. WordPress boasts a vibrant community to help you each step of the way, and offers endless amounts of plugins and themes to choose from as well.  That's why we were excited to interview Siobhan McKeown from the WordPress project to find out more about one of our most popular Bitnami Applications.

Watch the interview to:
  • Learn how to get started on WordPress with no or limited technical knowledge
  • Get advice on choosing a hosted service versus hosting your own WordPress
  • Hear what the future looks like for WordPress
  • Discover the advantages of joining the WordPress community 
Hear more about the project from Siobhan McKeown and then try it for yourself. Launch WordPress in the cloud or deploy it locally with free installers, virtual machines and cloud templates from Bitnami. Get 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 Siobhan McKeown of the WordPress Project.    

Siobhan McKeown:     Hi Stuart.

Stuart Langridge:       What is WordPress? I suspect that most people listening will have a reasonable idea but it would be useful to hear your description.

Siobhan McKeown:    WordPress’s most basic description is a publishing platform. It uses PHP and MySQL. It started out as a blog platform more than 10 years ago, but over time became more used as a CMS. Now it is used much more as a CMS than as a blog. Also, more recently it's being used as an application framework.

Stuart Langridge:       What's a typical WordPress user like, or is your community so diverse that it's really impossible to say?

Siobhan McKeown:     It's really diverse, and there are so many different types of people using it. The great thing about WordPress is that it's very user friendly and focused. Although it has become more complex over time, it's quite easy for people who aren't technical to use. We do have a lot of people using it here who have no idea what PHP is, but they can use it really well. And then we also have people who are hardcore developers and are doing all sorts of fancy stuff with WordPress. It's hard to pin it down because I think it's more than 23% of the Internet now, so 23% of the Internet is a lot of different types of people.