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In the modern world of application development and deployment, there are multiple ways users and developers can bring up new applications. Bitnami which got its start in 2011, is aiming to provide one of those options with a library of popular developer and server applications that can easily be deployed to an end-user device or to the cloud.
In an interview with eWEEK, Erica Brescia, co-founder and chief operating officer (COO) at Bitnami, explains what her company is all about and how it is helping to enable a new style of IT development and deployment.
Brescia said that Bitnami’s goal is to make it as easy to deploy an application on a server as it is to install an application on an endpoint computer. Bitnami has more than 90 different open-source applications and development environments in its software library that can be deployed with one-click installer packages on desktop, virtual machine and cloud deployments.
There are a number of differentiating factors to Bitnami’s approach to application packaging and deployment.
“We’re completely cross-platform, and we use our own technology to do the packaging of the applications,” Brescia said. “We can support any operating system and any deployment platform.”
Brescia added that Bitnami is also able to constantly monitor all the different releases of the different components and packages in its software library and is able to quickly build and test them across all the platforms they support.
“Our apps are always fresh and up to date,” Brescia said.
The promise of quickly updating applications was tested during the April Heartbleed security incident. Heartbleed is a security vulnerability in the open-source OpenSSL project that is part of multiple application and server deployments.
“We publish tens of thousands of images, and we have a million deployments a month, so we had a lot of users and a lot of packages to update,” Brescia said.
In terms of users, Brescia noted that approximately 60 percent of Bitnami’s users are developers. Developers will tend to start working with Bitnami on a local machine and when it’s time to move to production, they stick with Bitnami to get the same environment. Brescia said that approximately 30 percent of Bitnami’s users are business users.
“It’s a lot of shadow IT right now,” Brescia said.
She added that Bitnami sees a lot of departmental-level managers in large companies using Bitnami to quickly deploy needed business applications.
“With a million deployments a month, we reach quite a few people,” Brescia said.
Watch the full video interview with Erica Brescia below:
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist