VMware to Acquire Bitnami | Hacker News Reader

VMware to Acquire Bitnami

cloud.vmware.com

216 pointswhocanfly43 comments

I feel like I've never understood why I'd want to use Bitnami as opposed to ... just installing software. From the post, it sort of seems like the target audience is companies that have developers and "enterprise IT" (who are probably overworked and simultaneously tasked with maintaining AD and Google Apps) but no UNIX-specific sysadmin/SRE/build engineering staff?

Lots of small business as well. Want to deploy to the cloud but lack the skill set to manage a real server.

Is that not a disaster waiting to happen.

Of course, but the premise is that the small businesses don't know enough to make these evaluations anyway.

Not in the hypothetical world where Bitnami reaches through the connection and manages the “server” embedded in the software for them. Like Ubuntu LTS with automatic security updates + kernel patches turned on, but at the individual-application level.

The alternative is that they install it themselves, which sounds even riskier.

Isn't the alternative that they find a SaaS company to do it for them? Everything from WordPress to GitLab to Jenkins to ELK has good we'll-run-it-for-you vendors. (Bitnami also offers things like memcached and kube-state-metrics and language runtimes, but I'm not sure how you manage to make sure of them without having enough expertise to install software yourself. You can definitely find vendors to do the higher-level task for you, if you're in the market for something like that.)

Or that they hire someone with the relevant expertise, but sure, we can assume that they're not going to do that for the purposes of discussion.

Sometimes that is possible but not always. Sometimes it's cost prohibitive for a small use-case like a small business or an instance just a particular team. Sometimes those vendors want long-term contracts. Sometimes the providers themselves are not that great. You would be surprised how much revenue a nice front-end for creation with no operation support can bring (e.g old-school LAMP hosts).

As someone currently running a bitnami wordpress site on aws it's pretty nice being able to SSH in and change whatever you want. Bitnami gives you a reasonable starting point but then you have a lot of flexibility over how you manage the server. Maybe installing everything yourself isn't too hard, but I only run the website because I happen to be the most technically competent person around so it's nice not to have to think about it.

Admittedly I've only tried one managed wordpress service, but it was total garbage in comparison. Debugging basically involved opening a support request because even the most basic tools weren't available.

I thought that myself for awhile, but then I downloaded one of their images for a particular stack I was looking for for a project and it was just easier to implement the bitnami stack preloaded with everything then run sudo apt update -y && sudo apt upgrade -y. It honestly saved me a good bit of time configuring the stack.

You're missing the point of what Bitnami actually does. Bitnami isn't helping "enterprise IT" to install Wordpress. They are helping AWS/GCP/Azure/etc... to attract more users with less effort. It's kind of "hey, random guy that has no idea how to install Wordpress! Do you want to get a Wordpress up and running in <your favourite cloud provider> in less than a minute?".

Edit: look at the comment right after mine. Perfect proof.

Interesting - if I search for "install wordpress on cloud", I get a Google Cloud page (probably because of the major providers, Google Cloud is the only one that has "cloud" in its name) linking to a Google-built turnkey image https://cloud.google.com/wordpress/ . If I specifically search for "install wordpress on aws", AWS's docs tell you to install a Bitnami image https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/tutorials/launch-a-wo... .

Google's page also says this, which I strongly agree with, though:

> Note: For automatic software updates and security patches, consider using a provider such as Kinsta or WP Engine which offers fully-managed WordPress solutions.

It seems sort of irresponsible to find people who aren't super comfortable with apt-get install and make it easy for them to run a WordPress they're responsible for security updates for; you're just setting themselves up to get popped. If Bitnami solves this, that seems extremely valuable, but my experience is most of the automated ways to patch WordPress come at significant risk of breaking important plugins. And managed WordPress is a reasonable product (almost everyone who wants a WordPress can just use a hosted, managed solution) and a thriving market already.

Bitnami has worked with all three cloud providers - I was in at least one video meeting with them when I was at Google on the GCP team. (To be clear, I haven't worked for Google in over 4 years and am speaking only for myself here.)

I suspect there are Bitnami offerings in Google's marketplace too - most things in that marketplace are built by third parties such as Bitnami, but unlike for Amazon's marketplace Google does view themselves as the reseller of the products offered there.

Bitnami does require applying updates via e.g. apt-get, as mentioned in another reply from someone else. I wonder if their GCE images follow Google's norm of turning on automatic security updates by default, as do most regular Google-supported GCE operating system images. No idea.

PS - Hi, long time no see, hope you're doing well!

There are indeed Bitnami images in the GCP Marketplace, and they are even used for examples in the code-labs that GCP produces.

It is only somewhat recently that the emphasis in their marketplace is towards to Google-sourced images.

Plenty of reasons. I've used them to kick the tires on various things without needing to go through the install. Their images are distributed to many cloud providers so it took all of 5 minutes to get going.

Now, for long term, high-availability usage, it might not be the best idea but for many users it's "good enough".

Thank you. Our focus right now is expanding the library to support more and more of those production scenarios https://aws.amazon.com/quickstart/architecture/wordpress-hig...

I agree with you, additionally I have tried several bitnami images (including wordpress, phsbricator, magento among others) and the config is always a mess. You don't find things where they should be and it is very hard to update stuff.

i don't really even know what bitnami is, but their pre-configured wordpress multisite AMI was pretty useful to me when i was tasked with getting a wordpress server running a little while ago.

sure, i could have done it from scratch, but why bother when i can just grab an image and be done with it?

Daniel and Erica are two of the most thoughtful and kindest founders I know. We got to know each other during our yc batch (w13) and it’s been a great privilege to have Daniel as an advisor for my company.

Can’t think of a better match - the company that pioneered the App Store for servers joining the company that pioneered/commercialized virtualization.

My favorite Bitnami hack -> Using the free EdX Bitnami image[1] to hack a sophisticated LMS (Learning Management System) for your company.

[1] https://bitnami.com/stack/edx

Thanks Varun! Likewise, thanks for helping us and giving us technical feedback when we needed it. You have been pioneers and are on a great path yourselves.

My experience with Bitnami images was that it was very quick and easy to get up and running but trying to configure configuration on the server was pretty difficult because of how many bitnami configuration files there were spread out everywhere and not where you'd expect them

Yes, this is something that we need to continue to improve. Part of the challenge is that there is a tradeoff with making something "native" vs. consistent across MacOS, Linux, Windows and different formats (containers, VMs, etc)

Bitnami has their announcement at https://blog.bitnami.com/2019/05/vmware-to-acquire-bitnami.h...

I wonder when Rancher will get acquired? Its just a matter of time. And VMWare seems to be buying a lot of these types of companies.

I think many of these container orchestration adjacent companies large and small are standing up straight hoping for an acquisition in general — I don't think it's going to happen for all of them.

So... what happens now with all the employees that have stock options?

They probably exercise their options and make some $ off the transaction.

How so? They don't have any actual stock. They have options to stock.

Usually depends on the type of option. If they are 'double cliff' then the employee stock option will vest automatically, if they aren't then the emplyee will lose them.

I've never heard the term 'double cliff' before, can you explain?

I think they might mean "double trigger" acceleration, where the options vest automatically on change of control.

exercise the option = buy the stock

It depends on which type of options. The exercise date could be fixed or variable. But you could sell the options at its current market if there is a market.

Went through an acquisition with Vmware... they converted the stock options to Vmware options that vested at the same rate and were worth the exact same based upon the acquisition price. If they had already vested, they just paid you out. This may depend on the deal though.

I've been through two acquisitions and part of the deal terms if the valuation of the acquiree's shares (which the cap table and liquidation preferences have a huge effect on).

First time my options were converted to options in the acquirer's company.

Second time they turned into RSU's.

VMware is going to crush with heptio and bitnami teamed up

Yep and they're going to be some big competition to RedHat/IBM in the Kubernetes space. Hence my other post on who is going to acquire Rancher as they're one of the bigger names in the K8s arena. Cisco would be a good one (disclaimer: I work for them but have no knowledge of any acquisition).

Congrats VMWare

How much?

It announced "intent to acquire", and did not say.

I guess it is not a huge one because the growth would be a problem. Only installing the application on Cloud is deadly simple these days and is getting simpler. Each major cloud providers have their own app store. And people are moving to SaaS...

Correct. We are the top provider of those marketplaces

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