The BitNami Project has quietly rolled out the beta for a new tool designed to build custom application and other server stacks online: BitNami Studio.
BitNami Studio, which is in closed beta right now, came out recently in what's known as a "soft launch": no announcements or press calls, just sitting out there in the open waiting for some obnoxious journalist to stumble onto it and start asking pointed questions.
Oh wait, that's me.
I got in touch with Erica Brescia, CEO of BitRock, to find out what was going on.
It turns out that BitNami Studio is a natural progression from the BitNami Project itself, which features free application and server stacks that can be launched as virtual machines or within cloud services such as Amazon's EC2 with just a few clicks, all ready to go. BitNami also offers web application stacks that can be installed natively on Windows, Linux, OS X, and Solaris systems.
BitNami Studio takes that "in-a-can" experience one step further and lets customers build and deploy their own stacks, complete with custom files and applications, in just minutes.
Sure, we've seen studios before. rPath kicked the whole appliance builder movement with rBuilder, and Novell has it's very user-friendly SUSE Studio, both of which I've recently had cause to use. BitNami Studio's approach to building stacks and appliances is a little different.
Both rBuilder and SUSE Studio require that users build their stacks from the ground up, incorporating exactly the packages they need in just-enough OS (JeOS) frameworks. This gives users extremely granular control over their builds, but it means they also have to know which packages to install to get a viable stack built. That's not always easy.
BitNami Studio approaches this like BitNami itself: it focuses on the component level of the stack, not the packages and libraries. So if a user wants to create a LAMP stack, they would simply select the Apache, MySQL, and PHP components, plus any apps they would want to run on the stack, choose a platform, then zip! Off it goes.
Brescia was kind enough to give me a demo of the BitNami Studio beta interface and in just minutes, was indeed able to build a complete Drupal instance with (literally) my name on it. Since it's in early testing mode, I was asked to not give away too many details, but I will say this: this is a very fast solution. Most of those minutes I mentioned were actually caused by the Amazon's EC2 service building the AMI Brescia configured in just a few moments' time.
What's really cool about BitNami Studio is the REST-based API and command line tools that, Brescia explained, will allow users to automate the build process. That plays well into what seems to be the largest use case for BitNami Studio to date: building multiple stacks with developing applications so they can be tested by QA. Automating multiple versions of particular stacks means developers and testers can simulate a huge number of end-user scenarios--even on a nightly build schedule.
Having stacks that are so easy to build will give development shops a lot more flexibility to use role-based permission sets, Brescia explained. Developers and operators often use different configurations, so developing on one kind of stack might mean applications incompatibilities might arise when the developed app is deployed to the operations side.
"BitNami Studio makes it so easy to create machines to eliminate incompatibilities," Brescia said.
Another use case that beta testers are discovering is for software vendor sales teams, who can now, without a lot of technical knowledge, put together complete stacks that mirror the potential customer's configuration and demonstrate the software right then and there.
It should be noted that BitNami Studio will not be a free-of-charge system. Currently, single developers can sign up for a $50/month plan, while larger businesses can opt into the $500/month plan.
BitNami Studio is in beta now, but you can sign up for the program at the BitNami Studio site. Requests to join the BitNami Studio beta will be granted on a case-by-case basis.
Even with these costs, the ease and simplicity of BitNami Studio--not to mention the automation capabilities--make this an intriguing tool for application developers and, potentially, cloud deployers. Definitely worthy of a look.