Bitnami: Making it easy and efficient to test server apps on your desktop and in the cloud

Grazed from Network World.  Author: Mark Gibbs.

It’s Friday morning and marketing tells you they need a WordPress blog up and running by Monday and they want a theme like this and features like that and, and, and …  you’ve not got much time if you plan to have a weekend off so the last thing you’re going to want to do is work with a remote server. If you did you’d be loading themes one after another, testing them with various plugins, and generally beating the application into submission while dealing with the delays inherent in using a machine that’s somewhere out on the Internet. That would mean you’d be waiting just that little bit longer (or quite possibly, a lot longer) to do everything than you’d prefer.

The answer is, of course, to run the application locally but that will often involve a huge amount of preparation and messing around. I have a fantastic shortcut: Bitnami Stacks.  Bitnami Stacks are server-based open source applications packaged to a consistent standard with all of the app’s required libraries and dependencies, optimized for performance, and kept updated to the latest stable version…


A key aspect of Bitnami’s standards is that the apps are configured to be secure and Bitnami promises to update each Stack as vulnerabilities are discovered (“often within hours of the availability of a fix”) which, given problems such as the recent “Bash Bug” vulnerability, is incredibly important…

Read more from the source @ http://www.networkworld.com/article/2687904/cloud-computing/bitnami-making-it-easy-and-efficient-to-test-server-apps-on-your-desktop-and-in-the-cloud.html