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Bitnami - The Boy Scout For Cloud Applications

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Bitnami is kind of like the Boy Scout who helps the little old lady cross the street. Essentially the premise of Bitnami is simple - let users deploy the applications they want to use regardless of where they want to put them. Bitnami achieves this by having around 100 different open source and commercial applications which can be installed and configured. Applications Bitnami covers include Alfresco, DreamFactory, Drupal, Ghost, JasperReports, Joomla, Liferay, Magento, Moodle, PrestaShop, Redmine, SugarCRM and WordPress, as well as popular developer tools and stacks such as Apache Solr, Django, Gitlab, Jenkins, JBoss, LAMP, Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Tomcast, WAMP and XAMPP. Bitnami lets users put the apps anywhere - on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems, VMware or VirtualBox virtualized environments and the most popular cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Windows Azure.

It's also got an awesome story when it comes to avoiding lock in. Using Bitnami, customers can move apps across platforms - maybe develop on a laptop or local server and then deploy to production on AWS. Bitnami facilitates the process. In some ways it's similar to the other cloud migration vendors who aim to wrap the entire application stack so that it can be moved between cloud vendors. But Bitnami does so in a way which is far more useful to SMB customers - by abstracting everything up to application layer away from the user, it makes customers' lives a heap easier.

There's an obvious value proposition here and one which customers are also seeing - according to Erica Brescia, co-founder of Bitnami, last year there was over 100 million run hours on AWS alone through Bitnami, and this doesn't include customers using Bitnmai to deploy applications to Virtual Private Clouds. Across all the Bitnami channels, a million applications are deployed every month.

At the moment, customers wanting to deploy apps on Microsoft Azure have to use a manual process through the VMDepot. Today however Bitnami is launching a far more automated solution, and one which brings the Azure experience into line with the AWS one. The Bitnami Cloud Deployment Platform for Windows Azure is a free deployment console that helps customers to deploy server applications to Windows Azure. Deployment becomes as simple as selecting an application and a few mouse clicks. Users can deploy applications to a server size and configuration of their choice, within any Azure region and start, stop and delete servers directly from the console.

I really like the Bitnami story, not so much because of the "ending vendor lockin" line, but more because it is the ultimate expression of what cloud should mean for SMBs - it allows them to deploy the apps they need and forget about all the infrastructure stuff underneath. By fully supporting Azure, Bitnami will expose itself to the attention of a wider audience and I'd assume their metrics will increase accordingly.