Sunsetting Bitnami Launchpads

Authored by Alejandro Gómez, R&D Manager at VMware

The Bitnami Launchpad service was released at the beginning of 2013, when the major cloud service providers—AWS, Azure, and Google—were just developing and launching application marketplaces for their platforms. Bitnami Launchpad offered a simpler user experience to deploy applications in the cloud. Providing our own service also allowed us to give users access to the latest, most up-to-date version faster than was available through the cloud vendor marketplaces. Thousands of applications have been deployed through the Bitnami Launchpad.

However, since those early days, cloud service providers have shortened their validation and publishing timelines, and the user experience for deployment from their marketplaces has improved considerably. Through these cloud platform marketplaces, users not only get a simplified process for procuring software, but now they also get faster access to the most recent version of Bitnami solutions as well as a fully integrated deployment experience with the platform of their choice.

In this context, today we are announcing the deprecation of the Bitnami Launchpad service and recommend deploying our solutions directly through the cloud service providers’ marketplaces. Here are answers to a few questions you might have.

Where can I find Bitnami by VMware solutions?
We have worked with the major cloud service providers to make our software available to you:

• AWS LightSail and AWS Marketplace
• Azure Marketplace
• Google Cloud Marketplace

How does the Bitnami Launchpad deprecation affect my servers?
Your instances will not be stopped or removed because they are running in the platform of your choice under your cloud account. However, you will not be able to launch new servers or manage and access existing servers through the Bitnami Launchpad interface.

December 15, 2022: Launchpads will be accessible, but you will not be able to launch new instances or add new cloud credentials. However, you will still be able to manage your instances from our launchpads as well as from each cloud console.

February 15, 2023: Launchpads will no longer be accessible and you will have to manage your instances from each cloud console.

Which actions do I need to perform?
Option A (recommended): Upgrade your server. Launch a server for the most recent version of the application through one of our partners and migrate your data.

Option B: Ensure access to your existing server through the cloud service provider console. Download your SSH keys from the launchpads to ensure you will be able to access your instances after January 31, 2023. Find information about how to download them for each cloud provider:

• Download information for AWS
• Download information for Azure
• Download information for Google (Note: In Google you will be able to access them through SSH from the GCP console using the integrated Cloud Shell)
  

Join Bitnami at GCP Next 2016!

GCP NEXT 2016 begins today, and we are excited to announce that we are a proud partner. We will be demoing the latest additions to Stacksmith, which focus on combining easier, up-to-date container creation with integrations to CI systems (such as Jenkins) and container orchestration systems (like Kubernetes).

Stop by our booth (#8), and say hi to our engineers that are behind the project.

More information about GCP NEXT:

At GCP NEXT, you’ll have the opportunity to attend three visionary keynotes presented by GCP with industry leaders, 30 in-depth technical sessions, participate in self paced code labs, and hear how other IT leaders rely on GCP for mission critical cloud solutions.

The 2-day conference includes sessions designed to help you build on your cloud strategy:

• From idea to market in less than 6 months: Creating a new product with GCP
• IoT - from small data to big data: Building solutions with connected devices
• Security analytics for today's cloud-ready enterprise 
• Your new super power: Using machine learning to build applications that understand the world

Can’t make it to GCP NEXT in person? Don’t worry, you can live stream GCP NEXT for free. Register here: https://goo.gl/lrjTHV

Redis Security Release

Today, Redis released Redis 3.0.4, which patches several critical security issues. Redis suggests that all users upgrade to this new version.

Due to these security issues, we have released Bitnami Redis 3.0.4 in Google Cloud Platform and a Bitnami Redis container that fixes these issues. 

Have questions about Bitnami Redis or the security issue? Post to our community forum, and we would be happy to help you.

Welcome CouchDB to the Bitnami Launchpad for Google Cloud Platform!

We're happy to introduce CouchDB as part of the Bitnami Library for the Google Cloud Platform!

CouchDB is a modern and efficient database that completely embraces the web. It allows you to store your data with JSON documents and access them via HTTP.

It works well with modern web and mobile apps. You can even serve your web apps directly out of CouchDB!

Some popular features of CouchDB include:

• Store your data in documents in JSON and access them via HTTP
• Using JavaScript to query, index, combine and transform documents
• Distributing your data using incremental replication
• Primary-Primary setups with automatic conflict detection
• Native support for a RESTful API

You can check out all of these features by deploying CouchDB with one-click on the Bitnami Launchpad for the Google Cloud Platform. Click the button below to get started.

Want to get started right now? Launch your Bitnami CouchDB instance and connect to Futon via the following URL in your browser. There you will be able to create, manage and remove documents:

http://your_server_address:5984/_utils/

If you want to auto-login, you can connect to the following URL:

http://admin:your_password@your_server_address:5984/_utils/

If you want to know more about how to use Bitnami CouchDB, read our wiki page. Still have questions? We would be happy to answer them on our community forum.

Bitnami is Now on Google Cloud Platform

After working closely with the Google team, we’re thrilled to announce that Bitnami now supports Google Cloud Platform! As of today, all Bitnami apps may now be deployed with the one-click simplicity you’re used to on the Bitnami Launchpad for Google Cloud Platform. The Launchpad provides a simple interface for launching any of the over 100 applications now available on Bitnami - for free!

The video below shows just how easy it is to launch a Bitnami app on Google Compute Engine. Select from one of our developer environments, such as Rails, Node, Django or LAMP, or our huge range of apps - from WordPress and Drupal to Redmine and Jenkins to Discourse and eXo, and many others. Just visit the Launchpad to view the complete list of apps, click on the one you’d like to launch and we walk you through the simple process from there.

Get Started

Try this out today with the Google Cloud Platform free trial --you can check out just how quickly you can spin up apps with Bitnami on Google Cloud Platform free of charge.