BitNami Customer Spotlight: Nimble Books

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.

BitNami Customer Spotlight: Brescia University

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: Brescia University College

The web development team at Brescia University College is responsible for developing and deploying new web applications for the university. Going through the process of requesting, ordering and setting up new servers could take weeks, slowing down new development projects. In addition to having to wait for new equipment, working with physical servers gave the team finite development resources, restricting their ability to experiment with new applications.

The Brescia University web development team turned to BitNami Cloud Hosting and Amazon Web Services to get fast, cost-effective access to servers for evaluation, development and testing projects, as well as for applications they only need for a short period of time. On-demand access to cloud resources allows the team to spin up new servers within minutes so that they can be productive almost instantly, while only paying for the compute resources they actually use. When a project is complete or an application is no longer needed, the team simply deletes the server instance.

The Brescia University College web development team counts BitNami as "a key component of [their] 'flexible cloud' strategy" due to the platform's ability to rapidly provision servers with popular open source applications, its one-click server cloning and automated backups. These features enable the team to deploy new servers with the apps they need in minutes, clone them to set up new development environments or test updates before putting them into production, and ensure that they always have complete copies of their servers available in the event they run into issues. As a result, the web development team gets access to the resources they need, when they need them, and is able to select, develop and deploy new applications more quickly. Because they only pay for the resources they use, they are able to achieve these benefits while staying within a limited budget. Dan Bashaw, a web developer for the university says that BitNami Cloud Hosting saves him a considerable amount of time, enabling him to "do [his] job without getting bogged down in server management and administration."

A PDF of the complete case study is also available.

Waiting for Trac 1.0? The Beta is Already Available on BitNami!

Trac developers are preparing their next major release: Trac 1.0. And although it is not ready yet, Trac 1.0beta1 is available for download. We are happy to offer a ready-to-run package with Trac 1.0beta1 so you can get an early look at this much-anticipated release.

The most visible changes for Trac 1.0 are:

- Graph log support in the revision log
- Added support for Git
- Refreshed default theme for the user interface

A full list of changes can be found in the release notes.

This version of the BitNami Trac Stack bundles Python 2.7, Subversion 1.7.4 and Trac 1.0beta1. And, as always, it is available for free as ready-to-run installers, virtual machines and Amazon Cloud Images.

We plan to add new features and components in the next release of BitNami Trac Stack, keep an eye on the Trac new release and on the BitNami package!