We are often asked about how people use BitNami Cloud Hosting. As with the cloud in general, there are a huge variety of use cases and our customer base is incredibly diverse - ranging from Fortune 500s to universities to solutions providers who rely on BitNami Cloud Hosting to host applications for their clients. This is part of a series of posts that highlighting a few BitNami Cloud Hosting customers and explaining how they are using the platform to save time, money and do things that they couldn't do before they had BitNami and cloud computing.
BitNami Customer Spotlight: Brescia University College
The web development team at Brescia University College is responsible for developing and deploying new web applications for the university. Going through the process of requesting, ordering and setting up new servers could take weeks, slowing down new development projects. In addition to having to wait for new equipment, working with physical servers gave the team finite development resources, restricting their ability to experiment with new applications.
The Brescia University web development team turned to BitNami Cloud Hosting and Amazon Web Services to get fast, cost-effective access to servers for evaluation, development and testing projects, as well as for applications they only need for a short period of time. On-demand access to cloud resources allows the team to spin up new servers within minutes so that they can be productive almost instantly, while only paying for the compute resources they actually use. When a project is complete or an application is no longer needed, the team simply deletes the server instance.
The Brescia University College web development team counts BitNami as "a key component of [their] 'flexible cloud' strategy" due to the platform's ability to rapidly provision servers with popular open source applications, its one-click server cloning and automated backups. These features enable the team to deploy new servers with the apps they need in minutes, clone them to set up new development environments or test updates before putting them into production, and ensure that they always have complete copies of their servers available in the event they run into issues. As a result, the web development team gets access to the resources they need, when they need them, and is able to select, develop and deploy new applications more quickly. Because they only pay for the resources they use, they are able to achieve these benefits while staying within a limited budget. Dan Bashaw, a web developer for the university says that BitNami Cloud Hosting saves him a considerable amount of time, enabling him to "do [his] job without getting bogged down in server management and administration."
A PDF of the complete case study is also available.