BitNami (YC W13) Launches App Store for Server Software | Hacker News Reader

BitNami (YC W13) Launches App Store for Server Software

techcrunch.com

54 pointsridruejo25 comments

I've used BitNami a number of times and their product is incredibly polished and has a huge library of server apps. I needed to test some of our software with a couple of different versions of Drupal and I was able to spin up running instances in just a few minutes, without touching a command line. It's definitely a big step up from just launching an AMI.

Don't we already had an app store for servers called apt-get?

Imagine that you don't know how to use a command line, then look again.

So ... synaptic?

I know, there are likely use-cases not addressed by these tools that others can fulfill, but Synaptic does work as Graphical apt/aptitude

VNCing into a full GUI on a server just to run Synaptic seems like a waste, although I guess Windows admins do the equivalent. But as ridruejo said, most Web apps still require significant and often arcane configuration after you've gotten everything installed. (Arguably this is the app's problem to solve...)

In many cases it is not even the configuration of the application itself, which tends to be complex in general, but getting all the third-party dependencies (libraries, gems, servers, etc.) that is the pain, specially if the latest versions of any component is required. This tends not to be an issue for well known apps like WordPress, but it is for the less mainstream ones...

Wait so... command line is bad and when I suggest you don't have to use that, a GUI program is also bad? What answer were you looking for there?

apt-get works for system libraries but not really that well for high-level apps which have different requirements and release schedules, specially the less mainstream ones. We also support Windows and OS X, which do not have anything like apt-get. In those cases we use regular installers or the OS X App Store

Say what? Isn't Firefox a high-level application? What about LibreOffice? Or Apache HTTPD?

Isn't the distro maintainers the ones who define the release schedules? Doesn't Fedora or SuSE, for example, release the newest versions for Firefox, KDE to the latest on their current distro for example?

I think an Application Store for servers is something redundant, re-engineering the wheel.

But that's my 2¢.

EDIT: And I'm even talking about similar tools to tasksel.

Firefox and LibreOffice are desktop apps. Apache is a server. We are talking about server apps, in particular web applications. Anybody who has had to install a non-trivial Rails application like Gitlab, Discourse or Redmine, knows that pain.

What happens if the distro maintainers are not doing a good job and keep lagging behind? Shouldn't developers themselves be able to take charge of the situation?

They already can if they want to produce packages. This sounds like it may make that easier.

I'd still prefer to use the ones built and maintained by the distro though.

People laughed at Dropbox because Coda/rsync/Subversion already existed.

Hasn't Bitnami been going for years, though? (At least 4-5, I think). I'd be interested to find out why they took the Yc cash now.

We are profitable and we certainly did not do it for the cash :) We did it for the advice. I know this sounds trite, but they have been incredibly helpful in taking BitNami to the next level and they have done it before which companies like Heroku, which we look up to.

Fair enough! I hope you get everything you want out of the deal.

I've been a fan of your products for a while. They were great when I was working at a bank and it was a quick way to get something up and running for a demo quickly.

I have worked with Daniel and Erica (the Bitnami execs) for the last five years. They are smart and they have been steadily growing Bitnami for a while now. Their appliances make deploying and updating a snap.

The BitNami Cloud Hosting Features page [1] doesn't say anything about how easy (or how difficult) it is to update an application (or stack). Will I be notified if there's a new version available? Can updates be automated?

Other "managed hosting" providers make updates a big selling point. For example, check out the marketing copy at Page.ly (managed WordPress hosting) [2].

[1] http://bitnami.com/cloud/product-tour

[2] https://page.ly/features/

Fantastic news for the guys at Bitnami. I met Daniel López at LinuxCon 2012 in Barcelona and he let us all know there that they have an interesting proposal. I'm still missing some Nginx love on your stacks, btw, but I guess it'll come eventually.

Is the pricing just for the one click launch? Or have the public AMIs you've been maintaining gone away and it's all pay to play?

No, nothing has changed and we are not doing anything 'evil' :) The pricing is for our hosting service, which also has a free tier. We will continue to provide the AMIs for free.

I see only open source applications. Can someone offer commercial applications that are not open source?

Yes, commercial apps are coming soon to the platform. We already provide commercial versions of Liferay and SugarCRM in our Cloud Hosting product

Would it be like just providing you the complete package and installation steps or is there some kind of integration required?

Right now we handle all the packaging, but over the next few months you will be able to provide your own apps on top of the platform. We want to make this process as painless as possible :)

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