Turnkey Linux Hub 1.0 provides cloud hosting and backup capabilities for the Web application software appliances offered by the Turnkey Linux project.
Turnkey Linux
Hub 1.0 is a Web-based service that sits atop Amazon's Web Services to provide
cloud hosting and backup capabilities for the line of Web application software
appliances offered by the Turnkey Linux open-source project.
The
software-appliance-plus-cloud-services combination is similar to the Bitnami
Cloud Hosting product that I recently reviewed, except that where Bitnami's
software stacks are packaged for use on multiple operating systems, Turnkey
Linux is focused squarely on Ubuntu Linux as a foundation.
Turnkey
Linux appliances, which cover a broad range of popular open-source, Web-based
applications, are built atop the current Long Term Support version of Ubuntu
and abide by Ubuntu's system administration conventions. In addition, the
appliances ship with phpMyAdmin, Webmin and Shell in a Box to provide database,
system and command line tools through a Web interface.
The Ubuntu
customization that stands out the most in Turnkey Linux is the platform's
backup and restore utility, which creates encrypted backups of files, databases
and lists of installed packages, either to Amazon S3 or to another local or
networked location.
Turnkey
Linux appliances are available in a handful of different deployment formats,
including ISO images for bare-metal installation and OVF (Open Virtualization
Format) packages for deployment on virtualization hosts (such as VMware vSphere
or Citrix XenCenter) that support this format. Turnkey Linux appliances are
also available for deployment to Amazon's EC2 service, directly from the
Turnkey Linux Hub Web interface.
In my
tests, the platform's backup and restore utility did a great job easing the
migration of a particular appliance instance from one to another of these
deployment formats.
Turnkey Linux is an excellent option for individuals or organizations
looking to test drive and deploy open-source Web applications covered by the
project. It would serve well as a platform for building Web applications atop
popular open-source stacks: There are appliances available for generic LAMP (Linux,
Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl), Ruby on Rails and Django stacks, among
others.
The
project's mix of administration tools provide comfortable options for newcomers
and old hands at Linux administration alike, and the platform's wide deployment
and backup options make it easy to focus on the application at the top of the
stack.
All Turnkey
Linux appliances are freely downloadable, and pricing for S3 storage and EC2
hosting is based strictly on use, at the same rates that Amazon Web Services
charges directly. The Turnkey developers have considered charging a 10 percent
premium atop the EC2 rates to help fund the project, but as yet have not put
any such premium into place.
As Editor in Chief of eWEEK Labs, Jason Brooks manages the Labs team and is responsible for eWEEK's print edition. Brooks joined eWEEK in 1999, and has covered wireless networking, office productivity suites, mobile devices, Windows, virtualization, and desktops and notebooks. Jason's coverage is currently focused on Linux and Unix operating systems, open-source software and licensing, cloud computing and Software as a Service. Follow Jason on Twitter at jasonbrooks, or reach him by email at jbrooks@eweek.com.
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