VMware Acquires Bitnami, the 1-Click Application Deployment Pioneers
Deploying development and server environments for standard applicationslike Jenkins, GitLab, TensorFlow, or PostgreSQL is conceptually simple, but all too often ends in a tortuously time-consuming process for developers and DevOps teams to suffer through on a continuous basis. This is due to the differences in server environments in terms of operating system configuration, network and storage access, and hypervisor on the one hand, and the various available deployment models (Docker, Kubernetes, Virtual Machines, Bare Metal) on the other.
Addressing the Key Challenges of Modern Application Management
How do you keep these environments consistent between teams? How do you ensure consistency between development, staging, and production instances? How do you make sure developers do not work on too-simple single tire development environments on their laptops that do not appropriately mimic production instances? How do you get consistency between a TensorFlow environment installed on a Mac, a Windows PC, and a standard Linux box? And how will you handle updates consistently across environments? Will your hardening and enterprise-wide configuration standards carry over to new versions? How about dependencies on a certain version of a database or application server? These are exactly the questions Bitnamihas been focusing on since its inception in 2011.
The Application Catalog — Central App Deployment and Day 2 Management
One of Bitnami’s product managers described the Application catalog as the equivalent to Apple’s Appstore on iPhone and iPad. It aims to offer 1-click application deployments for anyone, no matter their infrastructure and preferred deployment model. For example, if you need a quick WordPress blog instance, you can pull down the containerized version that includes all the dependencies and critical configuration items to deploy WordPress on Kubernetes, VMs, a multi-tier server setup, or on your local Mac. And similar to the Apple Appstore, centralized application upgrades are available through the push of a button. This is huge for everyone who has gone through major application upgrade projects in the past. The ability to instantly roll-back alone is a great ‘life insurance’ that lowers the threshold for application upgrades in general.
Stacksmith — Roll and Govern Your Own Applications
In 2018, Bitnami introduced Stacksmith, a cloud-agnostic platform that enables customers to package and distribute their own application stacks, similarly to the Bitnami-maintained applications available through the Application Catalog. While infrastructure-independence is still critical, the other crucial aspect of Bitnami Stacksmith is its pluggable architaecture, where enterprises can roll their own tooling for monitoring, test automation, artificat management, security scanning, etc. into their distribution packages. Once deployed, they can then centrally govern and upgrade the resulting application instances.
Verdict — Congratulations, Great Choice
Bitnami provides VMware with a boost in technology and ‘street cred’ that will help VMware jump from infrastructure virtualization company to digital transformation vendor. This acquisition truly is all about obtaining Bitnami’s IP and adding the platform on top of Heptio / PKS Kubernetes management and VMware’s still little known Cloud Automation Services. Making it easy for customers to move applications to Kubernetes, hosted on vSphere infrastrcture, is VMware’s key goal. Bitnami could prove to be a powerful ‘puzzle piece’ for VMware to get there faster than the competition.
Originally published on my blog: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vmware-acquires-bitnami-1-click-application-deployment-torsten-volk/
