BitNami (YC W13) Launches App Store for Server Software

http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/25/y-combinator-company-bitnami-makes-deeper-move-on-booming-app-store-market/

by ridruejo • 13 years ago

54 25 13 years ago

njx2• 13 years ago

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

ridruejo7• 13 years ago

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

njx2• 13 years ago

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

bradleybuda• 13 years ago

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.

northisup• 13 years ago

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

wmf2• 13 years ago

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

Nursie3• 13 years ago

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

ridruejo7• 13 years ago

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

LaSombra• 13 years ago

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.

staunch• 13 years ago

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

gadders2• 13 years ago

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.

ridruejo7• 13 years ago

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.

gadders2• 13 years ago

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.

ErikRogneby• 13 years ago

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?

ridruejo7• 13 years ago

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.

javipas• 13 years ago

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.

socialized• 13 years ago

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.

troymc• 13 years ago

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/

BitNami (YC W13) Launches App Store for Server Software

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