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: Nimble Books
Nimble Books provides an online platform, Nimble Combinatorial Publishing (NCP), for automatically building and publishing e-books based on content that is open access, public domain, user-contributed and other data. The NCP content repository can access more than 10 million documents, which can be selected, combined, and annotated in an almost inconceivably large number of combinations and permutations.
In order to develop the platform and launch the business, the company had to build out its infrastructure and the application itself. Nimble first used BitNami Cloud Hosting to evaluate various applications for this purpose, including WordPress, MediaWiki, Magento, Solr and Redmine, running up to ten separate servers for development and testing purposes. The ability to quickly launch instances with a wide variety of applications made it easy for Nimble to evaluate the apps that would be the best fit for its needs.
After determining that Magento, an e-commerce platform, Solr, an enterprise search platform, and Redmine, a bug-tracking system, were the best fit for the company, Nimble put them all into production. The company is currently running three separate servers for these apps: one for the production store, one for failover and another for research and development. One of the many benefits that Nimble receives from BitNami Cloud Hosting is that it can spin up duplicate machines at will for both development and scaling purposes.
For Nimble Books, BitNami Cloud Hosting provides the foundational technology upon which the product and the company itself was built. The service enabled Nimble to rapidly develop its application without losing precious development time setting up and configuring development environments and provides ongoing value with its one-click server cloning feature, monitoring and automatic backup capabilities. In addition to powering the product itself, BitNami Cloud Hosting is used to host the bug-tracking system for the development team and the Solr-based search engine. According to the company's founder, Fred Zimmerman, BitNami Cloud Hosting provided "obstacle removal and acceleration", speeding time to market while eliminating the need to purchase or configure any servers.
A PDF of the complete case study is also available.