Self-service Apps - Automating the Packaging-to-publishing Experience for Kubernetes with Bitnami Stacksmith and Kubeapps

Do you have the need to make containerized applications available to your internal teams? Here is a great way to accomplish not only that, but also automate the workflow associated with packaging, launching, and updating these applications. Learn how combining Bitnami Stacksmith and Kubeapps can provide a marketplace experience from within your current Kubernetes cluster. You can use this one simple workflow to package, deploy and maintain the applications you have developed, the commercial software you have customized, or the older applications you are migrating.

Stacksmith provides automated application packaging and ongoing maintenance of your applications. Kubeapps provides a complete application delivery environment that empowers users to launch, review and share applications. Together they offer a powerful packaging-to-launch experience for Kubernetes applications.

We created a brief how-to video that shows you how easy it is to integrate both Stacksmith and Kubeapps with your preferred artifact repository (such as JFrog Artifactory or ChartMuseum). Doing so streamlines and automates the packaging, updating, and publishing of your applications to a Kubernetes cluster.

In the video, we demonstrate the following:

• Use Stacksmith to package a .Net Core application for Kubernetes
• Once packaged, Stacksmith pushes the container image to the registry and the Helm chart to the artifact repository
• Kubeapps scans the artifact repository and makes the application deployable with just a few clicks
• The application gets launched via Kubeapps
• Over time, components of your application will need updating (security and package updates are tracked by Stacksmith). Re-package your application with Stacksmith
• Stacksmith pushes the updated container image to the registry and the Helm chart to the artifact repository
• Kubeapps fetches the new version of your application

                               

Besides the convenience and automation provided by integrating Stacksmith and Kubeapps with the repositories that store and verify assets, are there other benefits? Yes - doing so provides an end-to-end solution that maintains trust between development, security and operations. Now you can ensure that your code, dependencies, security policies, operations scripts and orchestration come from a trusted repository, and that they will get securely and continuously packaged.

Generate, maintain, store and present - trusted applications from trusted artifacts

And Bitnami can deliver these benefits regardless of your level of DevOps sophistication, whether you are using only basic tools or have a fully automated process in place. It is easy to integrate the packaging, distribution, and maintenance capabilities we are talking about here into any existing tool chain or DevOps process.

Learn more - check out the video and visit the Stacksmith and Kubeapps pages.

Artifactory: Binary repository manager now part of BitNami

We are happy to announce that Artifactory is now available as part of the the BitNami library. Artifactory is a binary repository manager for Maven, Ivy and Gradle modules among others. This solution is already used by a large number of popular open source projects and is now available in BitNami as native installers for  Windows, OS X and Linux, virtual machines and Azure and Amazon EC2 cloud images.

Baruch Sadogursky, Developer Advocate at JFrog, the company behind Artifactory, tells us more about this project.

What is the goal of the Artifactory application?

Artifactory is a Binary Repository. It is intended to solve all the binary storage-related needs in an organization, being it organizational Maven/Gradle proxies, in-house YUM repositories, NuGet galleries, Ruby Gems hosting, or an operations department repository with VM images.

What are some of the features of Artifactory?

The most prominent features of Artifactory are the smart checksum once-and-only-once content storage, exceptional integration with all the most popular build tools and CI servers, the schema-less binaries metadata and the automation features, like REST-API and user plugins.

Which projects or organizations are using Artifactory currently?  What kind of projects do they use it for?

We have several hundred thousands of open source users and thousands of paying customers. More and more are joining every day. The usage varies from simple Maven proxies to very complicated enterprise-wide cross-continent setups with sophisticated promotion scenarios. You can find some of our paying customers listed on this page. Large and popular open source projects, like SpringSource, Jenkins, Grails, Gradle, Typesafe etc. are releasing and distributing their software from the Artifactory cloud servers.

What do you expect will be the main benefits of having BitNami packages available for Artifactory?

Having native installers for hosted servers are indeed a powerful enabler, but having cloud installers in our cloud-oriented world is priceless. Thanks for the cloud installers, we expect even more adoption of Artifactory.

Of course, the best way of getting an idea of what Artifactory has to offer is to take a look at it yourself. Launch a free cloud demo server with the BitNami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the launch button below. 

If you are interested in having your own Artifactory server running you can get any of our free, ready to run deployment offers: native installers for  Windows, OS X and Linux, virtual machines and Azure and Amazon EC2 cloud images.

Artifactory, Dolibarr and updates to the BitNami weekly contest

Two weeks ago...

Artifactory won the bi-weekly BitNami contest two weeks ago and we will add it to the the BitNami Library soon. Artifactory is a binary repository manager for Maven, Ivy and Gradle modules among others. It will be the first application in this category for which BitNami will provide one-click deployment options.

Today...

Today, we are glad to announce a new winner: Dolibarr. This application is an ERP and CRM system for small and medium companies. It will be great addition to the BitNami Library which already provides OpenERP, PhpCompta, SugarCRM and X2CRM in similar categories.

In two weeks...

Which application we should add next depends on you. Starting today, a new contest will be running for two weeks, with a new feature: every like, share or tweet will count as an additional vote. To encourage sharing, these likes and tweets will be maintained and count for the next application contest, in case the application is not a winner. Vote for your favorite application now!