Bitnami Announces Kubernetes Training Offerings

Bitnami now offers Kubernetes training programs.

From publicly available sessions for individuals to customized courses for entire teams, we offer many different training options. These include in-person or virtual classes, and range from introductory to expert level curriculum. If you are interested in custom courses, our team would be happy to create curriculum based on your team’s needs.

Bitnami’s Senior Director of Cloud Technology and lead trainer, Sebastien Goasguen, has several years of experience designing and delivering Kubernetes training, as well as authoring the CNCF Kubernetes certification itself. Sebastien is well recognized for writing books such as:

• Kubernetes Cookbook, O'Reilly Media 
• Docker in the Cloud, O’Reilly Media 
• Docker Cookbook, O’Reilly Media 
• 60 Recipes for Apache CloudStack, O’Reilly Media 

Bitnami is recognized as one of the primary trainers for Kubernetes globally. This includes providing training at CNCF, KubeCon and Open Source Summit events.

During these training sessions, students will have a hands-on tour of Kubernetes core concepts and gain an understanding of how to use Kubernetes primitives to build a distributed application that can scale.

As the course comes to a close, students will have a clear understanding of how to take container images to production, build a complex distributed application, and manage it in the data center. Along with a general understanding of Kubernetes and containers with hands-on demos, they will also learn about real world deployments that Bitnami and other companies are running in production.

In short, they will be well positioned to embark into the world of Kubernetes.

Contact us for a proposal that will suit your needs, or check out the schedule of publicly available training offerings that we provide around the world.

Meet the Bitnami Team: Sebastien Goasguen

The Bitnami team is a diverse group of talented people distributed all over the world. Get to know them better through this series of blog posts.

Sebastien Goasguen is our Senior Director of Cloud Technologies and an avid outdoor sports enthusiast.

Sebastien and his family enjoying a visit to Camp Nou

A brief bio: 

I am not a freshman anymore so I have done a few things. I spent a long time in academia, not only getting a Ph-D (2001), but after that I stuck around and only left in 2012 when I joined Citrix. I had the chance to work on some big grid computing projects in the US and in Europe, I spent couple summers at CERN working on their first cloud, then I worked on CloudStack for a while, before writing the O’Reilly Docker cookbook. That was the signal for me that it was time to take a chance.

I discovered Kubernetes while writing the book, fell in love with the system and decided to create Skippbox. It was a major challenge doing it out of Europe and with a handful of remote engineers, but I am very proud of what we managed to accomplish with almost nothing. As a fun bio fact, in 2009 , the European Space Agency recruited a new set of Astronauts. I applied and made it to the first selection in Hamburg, unfortunately I stopped there. Imagine, Bitnami could have had an engineer in space, talk about being remote!

Why you joined Bitnami and what excites you about working here? 

I joined Bitnami because it was a perfect fit to get Skippbox to the next level. I knew that we needed to grow to have a more significant impact (4 engineers is not enough). Bitnami has a strong foundation and is focusing on applications. When we look at our industry, I feel that the Cloud is fulfilling its promise to make infrastructure a utility, it is time to go back to applications. Containers and systems like Kubernetes make that switch natural. As you start using them you immediately forget about the infrastructure and think about the apps.

It is this focus on applications that I liked about Bitnami. They have delivered apps on bare-metal, VM, Clouds and now are delivering apps to new formats. I wanted to help them do that as well as pioneer some new applications framework like serverless.

I also have to admit that I liked the fact that Bitnami had strong european DNA and was operating for the long term, helping customers navigate these evolutions of technologies and software practices. It is not just about the latest fancy tech, it is about applications environments for the long term.

What are you working on? 

I lead our container and Kubernetes efforts. This involves everything related to building awesome containers: Make sure that we follow best practices, have small image sizes, are automatically updated and run well on any container platform. It also means all our Kubernetes upstream activities in the open source community, things like our involvement with Helm charts, Monocular, and of course Kubeless. Kubeless is our new serverless framework, that I started with Tuna at Skippbox. Kubeless fits well with the overall apps strategy of Bitnami so we are continuing our effort. We hope to build a solid community around it and stay close to the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Generally speaking, since we see applications moving towards a container format and a Kubernetes deployment environment, I lead all our efforts in that space to make sure we do a great job for our users and also help the community grow by contributing directly to the ecosystem.

What do you like to do for fun? 

I am a sports guy, a bit out of shape these days but sports is my definition of fun. I get out of my house and I go run, bike, hike, camp. I just bought a new mountain bike and I am slowly shaping up to be able to climb the Jura. If everything goes well I will be back in shape to run a half-marathon in the fall. I have ran 6 marathons dating back to Chicago in 2004. I ran the Chamonix Marathon in 2011, which was an 8 hour “fast” hike with 7500 feet of climb (2600+ meters). I also play golf a couple times a year, my wife being a Golf teacher we hang out at golf courses quite a bit, and I usually hit couple buckets of balls every week, it is good to get out of the office (or shall I say basement).

Interested in working with Bitnami and Sebastien? Apply for one of our open positions!

Introducing ksonnet, an Open Source configuration experience for Kubernetes

We are pleased to announce ksonnet today, an open source tool for configuring applications running on Kubernetes clusters that we have built in collaboration with our friends from Box, Microsoft and Heptio.

Bitnami's mission is to make awesome software available to everyone. We originally started providing easy to use native installers for popular open source server software. We've quickly expanded into providing virtual machines, cloud images and, more recently, containers.

Kubernetes has emerged as the leader in deploying production container workloads. Though Kubernetes can be thought of as an orchestration system, it has turned into a full-fledged platform that others can build on. A large ecosystem of contributors has emerged, providing tooling around monitoring, security, management and any other aspect of building and maintaining Kubernetes clusters. In particular, Bitnami has been involved with the Helm package manager and related projects such as Monocular and Kubeless, the Kubernetes-native serverless framework.

Internally, we have been early adopters of Kubernetes ourselves. In the process of migrating all of our infrastructure to Kubernetes, we ran into scenarios that pushed the limits of what current solutions could deal with. As a result, we have ended up creating our own tooling to help define and manage complex Kubernetes deployments. Around the same time, Heptio was working on a similar project and approached us to combine efforts, resulting in ksonnet.

ksonnet is an open source configuration tool for configuring applications in Kubernetes based on the jsonnet templating library. It is designed to be easy to use, yet extensible and powerful enough so it can cover as many scenarios as possible.

Our goal is that ksonnet will help lower the barrier of adoption for Kubernetes and will continue to evolve and integrate with the rest of the Kubernetes ecosystem. Though it has just been released, it is already being worked on by an active group of contributors that includes Red Hat, CoreOS, Box and Microsoft. We are particularly excited about the integration with the Helm project, allowing the generation of Helm charts that support ksonnet as an alternative to existing templates.

Heptio and us are excited to share ksonnet with the community, helping push Kubernetes further into the mainstream. Give it a try today and let us know what you think!

Security Release: Joomla! 3.7.1

A critical SQL Injection vulnerability for Joomla! has been recently identified within version 3.7.0.  Joomla! version 3.7.1 is now published and available to address this vulnerability and other bug fixes.  You can find more information in regards to version 3.7.1 and the security vulnerability within version 3.7.0 in this Joomla! blog post.

The Joomla! team strongly encourages users to update their Joomla! site(s) to the version 3.7.1.  Bitnami has released Bitnami Joomla! 3.7.1 installers, virtual machines and cloud images for all platforms. You can find instructions on how to upgrade your Bitnami Joomla! application here.

Have questions about Bitnami Joomla! or the Joomla! security vulnerability? Post to our Community Forum, and we will be happy to help you.

Newly Released Open edX Ficus Now Available in Bitnami

We are happy to announce the release of Ficus, the latest version of the popular Open edX online learning platform. Conceived by edX, a nonprofit online learning destination founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, Open edX is the chosen online learning solution for a wide variety of educational institutions, non-profits, and corporate training departments.

Bitnami’s Open edX package contains everything you need to run online learning courses out of the box. Some of the application’s main features include:

• Open edX Studio to create the course structure and add content, including problems, videos, and other resources. Studio is also used to manage the course schedule and team, set grading policies, publish each part of a course, and more.
• A Learning Management System (LMS) that learners use to access course content, including videos, textbooks, and problems, and to check their progress in the course. The LMS includes forum and wiki functionality for both learners and instructors.
• Full customization, with themes that incorporate an organization’s logos, images, and color schemes. Themes for Open edX Studio and LMS can incorporate custom page templates and CSS for a truly unique look.

What’s New in Ficus

The latest version of Open edX includes many new features centered around the LMS, the studio, and course author tools. The edX team has also added enhanced course data for instructors and students, new third party authentication capability, and accessibility improvements.

For a complete list of new features in Ficus, take a look at the Open edX release blog post.
Interested in trying Open edX? You can launch a one-hour demo in the cloud, absolutely free! See how easy it is to get started with an Open edX cloud image by taking a free test drive.

You can also launch Open edX Ficus in your own cloud account, download a Virtual Machine, or download a native installer for Linux.

Visit our documentation to learn how to manage your installation. Still have questions? Head to our community pages for expert advice from our team.

WordPress security issue: Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution (RCE)

A critical security WordPress vulnerability was recently published. The Remote Code Execution PoC exploit described in this advisory is based on version 4.6. However, other versions of WordPress prior to 4.7.1 may also be affected.

The WordPress team strongly encourages their users to update their Wordpress site(s) to the most recent version: 4.7.4.  If you already have a running version of Bitnami WordPress, the application can be updated from the admin panel. Note that the Automatic Background Upgrades functionality is enabled by default but upgrading from 4.6.x to 4.7.y is not automatic. You can confirm that the update has been done by checking the version from within your admin panel.

We have released Bitnami WordPress 4.7.4 (and Multisite version) installers, virtual machines and cloud images for all platforms.

Have questions about Bitnami WordPress or the security issue? Post to our Community Forum, and we would be happy to help you.