Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Our September Bitnami Power User: Bob Stolzberg


We sat down with Bob Stolzberg of CenturyLink, a Principal Engineer (and avid fan of Bitnami's JBoss and Tomcat Blueprints) whom we worked with closely during our Bitnami Blueprints launch on the CenturyLink Cloud. After learning about our ‘Power Users’ monthly feature he contacted our COO directly to express how much he loves Bitnami resources. Naturally, we jumped at the chance to offer Bob our September Power User spot!

Bob is the ultimate evangelist. If there is ever a chance to utilize our web apps and stacks on a daily basis around the CenturyLink office he is the first one to recommend us. Check out a helpful blog post he recently authored, “Spinning Up Servers and Performance Monitoring in Minutes.”

He kindly got on the phone to walk our team through CenturyLink’s amazingly optimized Cloud Platform where our Bitnami Blueprints live. It’s incredibly easy for CenturyLink fans to navigate and deploy Bitnami Blueprints on their cloud platform, which made them a natural fit for a Bitnami partnership. The Bitnami Team is stoked to present Bob’s Power User Q&A. Read on and learn more about one of our favorite CenturyLink engineers, Bob Stolzberg:

What is your occupation? 

Principal Engineer at CenturyLink

What are your hobbies? 

In my spare time I enjoy hunting, fishing, metal detecting and spending time with my family.

Why did you start using Bitnami, and for what purposes? 

I started using Bitnami to automate the installation and configuration of a stack through Blueprints on the CenturyLink Cloud. A developer can rapidly ‘spin-up’ a LAMP stack (for example) in a low-cost environment, craft a blueprint that calls the Bitnami Blueprint as a base (everything is scalable and interactive), and have their customer information automatically configured every time. It’s very apparent that, much like CenturyLink, Bitnami is focused on speed and productivity.

What projects are you currently working on? 

Lots. :) Recently, I was involved in the task of helping to integrate Bitnami Blueprints with the CenturyLink Cloud. The magic of [CenturyLink’s] control panel is that you can easily/quickly configure and download Blueprints in under 1 minute. It was a fun project to work on as I’m a personal fan of both.

Do you have any favorite stacks/apps in the Bitnami Library? 

LAMP, MEAN, WAMP, Magento, Piwik, WordPress. Most recently I deployed Piwik to share project updates with a small team of developers and contractors inside CenturyLink.

How do you evangelize the Bitnami brand to peers/friends? 

I tell all of my friends and coworkers about Bitnami whenever I’m provided the opportunity. Just makes life simple and incredibly easy to install software.

We love to hear hear from our users, and we would love to hear about your personal experience with Bitnami as well. Feel free to reach out to us, and you might just be the next Bitnami Power User!