The Bitnami/EC2 Combo Rocks

The other day I had a reason to check out a software package. It’s open source, so grabbing it wasn’t the issue. But like most web applications these days it had a pile of dependencies — common dependencies, to be sure, but setting things up by hand can be a pain, and likely to take more time than I was willing to give to it just to check out what this application offered.

This is where Bitnami.org and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) come in. Bitnami is a free service that packages up complete application stacks so you can install an application in one very simple process. For example, if your application requires, as many of them do, an Apache web server, a MySQL database, and support for a programming language like PHP, all of that is bundled with the application that requires those services. When you install a Bitnami stack, you’re installing a separate instance of all of those things. Sure, it may mean you will have several different copies of Apache or MySQL running on a single server, but hey, diskspace is cheap. So is RAM.

But where this really starts to shine, particularly when you just want to check something out before committing to a more permanent installation, is in combination with Amazon’s EC2 service. If you already have an account with Amazon Web Services you can find your application stack on Bitnami.org that is already configured and ready to be installed on EC2. Click the appropriate link for the EC2 zone you want to run it in, and either a 32-bit or 64-bit processor, and away you go. You get launched directly into the EC2 control panel where, after answering a few questions, your instance is launched.

This process literally only takes a few minutes, from initially clicking the link to logging in to your newly-launched web application. I did exactly this only this morning, and spent maybe half-an-hour in getting it going and playing around with the application enough to know that it was worth further investigation. I alerted a colleague to check it out and went on with my other work.

If you have never installed software on a Unix platform — especially from source code — perhaps the above story doesn’t sound so remarkable. But believe me, this is worlds away from where we were only a few years ago. And that, my friend, is a very, very good thing.