Get WordPress Bundles for the Google Cloud Platform Through Bitnami

Originally published on the Jetpack Blog


In August, developers’ lives got a lot easier when official WordPress images certified by Bitnami and Automattic became available on Amazon Web Services.

Now, you can also find official WordPress images on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP)! Automattic (the folks behind Jetpack, WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and more) partnered with Bitnami to provide a straightforward, secure way to use WordPress and Jetpack on GCP.






From the moment you click the Launch on Compute Engine button, you can focus on your website content without worrying about how to package and launch your new site on the Google Cloud Platform server. And the WordPress images are free to launch — you’ll only need to pay Google to host your application once it’s deployed on the Google Cloud Console.
What's in the box?

To give you a head start with site-building, the image has the popular Jetpack and AMP plugins pre-installed.

Jetpack is Automattic’s all-in-one solution for WordPress. It replaces dozens of plugins with a single solution that gives you rock-solid site performance, security, and customization tools, including: 

• A free image CDN to optimize images and serve them from Jetpack’s global network.
• Brute force attack prevention to automatically block hacking attempts.
• Backups to protect your investment.
• Site activity to monitor all changes made on your website as they happen.
• Dozens of high-quality Gutenberg blocks to make editing posts and pages in WordPress a breeze. Add contact forms, ads, payment buttons, image galleries, and more to your site.

See the full list of features at Jetpack.com.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an essential tool for building rich, fast websites that work great on mobile devices. Previously, AMP mode would leave out features and styles, but the AMP plugin for WordPress converts all your content to AMP markup automatically. Other highlights include:

• Core theme support that works with all WordPress core themes from Twenty Ten to Twenty Twenty.
• A compatibility tool for detailed debugging information for validation errors.
• CSS tree-shaking that automatically removes the majority of unused CSS to bring your files below AMP’s 50KB limit for CSS.

Pick the WordPress image that works for you

Bitnami provides a range of cloud images for different needs. To launch an image, click the link then select Launch on Compute Engine. A WordPress server will be running on your console in minutes! Choose from:

• WordPress Certified by Bitnami and Automattic: ideal for personal sites and testing environments. It includes all default features.
• WordPress Multisite Certified by Bitnami and Automattic: perfect if you have different domains and sites controlled by a unique administrator.
• WordPress with NGINX and SSL Certified by Bitnami and Automattic: the right choice for dealing with a high number of connections.
• WordPress Multi-Tier Certified by Bitnami and Automattic: designed for high-demand environments. The application and database run on multiple virtual machines, which improves capacity and security.

Find out which WordPress image best matches your WordPress use case.

Not sure where to start? Follow this step-by-step guide! If you’re stuck or have questions about launching WordPress on Google Cloud Platform, check out Bitnami’s documentation for WordPress or visit the Community Support Forum.

Connect to a Multi-Broker Kafka Cluster in a Kubernetes Production Environment

Bitnami provides a Kafka Helm chart ready to run in demanding production environments. It is completely up-to-date and configured to provide high performance and fault tolerance. 

This chart includes a values-production.yaml file which lets you set numerous parameters oriented to production configuration, such as the number of Kafka nodes, default replication factors for automatically created topics, Kafka authentication, and so on.

To support production scenarios that use external clients to connect to the Kafka clusters, a new feature has been added: the option to include and configure an additional listener and advertiser listener for your deployment.

How can I connect to my cluster externally if I am running more than one Kafka broker?  

That was the question that some of our customers asked. As a result, we have enabled connections from outside the Kubernetes cluster for multi-broker Kafka deployments. 

The Bitnami Kafka Helm chart now includes new parameters in its values-production.yaml and values.yaml files that support the configuration of an additional listener and advertised listener to enable accessing Kafka brokers using external clients. 

There are two ways to configure external access to the Kafka brokers: using LoadBalancer or NodePort services.
In both cases, the Helm chart will create an independent service for each Kafka broker (a service per pod). The next step is to add the corresponding parameter values in each broker for the service selected: 

• LoadBalancer: loadBalancerIP 
• NodePort: nodePort, and optionally, the domain   

Check out the Bitnami Kafka Helm chart documentation to learn how to configure the external connection parameters depending on the approach you prefer for your deployment. 

With this new feature, the Bitnami Kafka Helm chart covers user needs in real production scenarios. 
Do you want to learn more about how to use the Bitnami Kafka Helm chart in production? Follow this step-by-step guide to deploy a scalable Apache Kafka/Zookeeper cluster on Kubernetes.