Bitnami Blog

Introducing Kubeapps

2017-12-04T09:27:00.000-08:00

Today we are proud and excited to announce Kubeapps, a package agnostic application dashboard for Kubernetes. We see it as a compass that helps Kubernetes users find their way in the different ways to package a Kubernetes applications as well as a boostrapping mechanism so that all the necessary add-ons can be installed in your cluster easily.

For those of you who have been long-time Helm users, the website kubeapps.com may be familiar- until now it was a Chart discovery site. We decided to build upon the success of Kubeapps and extend the experience to bring applications of all types to Kubernetes users.

Indeed, now that it is clear that Kubernetes has won the container orchestration battle, it is time to focus on applications. At Bitnami we have been packaging applications for the cloud for almost a decade now. In building Kubeapps, we keep focusing on our core strength while bringing a useful service to the community and helping our customers that are embracing Kubernetes and migrating to container-based applications.

That’s why we decided to re-launch Kubeapps, making it more generic and able to handle all sorts of Kubernetes applications instead of just Helm charts. In particular, with the growing interest in serverless-based applications, our Kubeless project makes a perfect companion to Kubeapps. So Kubeapps is now made of three components:

A command line interface that helps your bootstrap all the necessary Kubernetes cluster add-ons to deploy and manage your applications.
A community site, hub.kubeapps.com, aimed at becoming the Docker Hub of Kubernetes applications. It now has social features like starring and commenting.
An in-cluster application dashboard, built on Monocular, that also features the Kubeless user interface to bring in serverless capabilities to kubeapps.

From a technical standpoint, The Hub is an instance of Monocular with the added social features enabled thanks to the ability to log in to Kubeapps. The code and various microservices that it is now composed of are all available on GitHub in the Kubeapps organization. We believe that everyone in the community will enjoy starring and leaving comments on their favorite charts. In the near future, we plan to allow users to submit new applications and new application registries to Kubeapps so it can act as a true aggregator of shareable Kubernetes applications.

The command line interface is Golang binary that allows users to easily install the following add-ons into any cluster (caveat: only Minikube and GKE are tested right now, AKS is coming soon):

Helm/tiller (in a secure, opinionated deployment configuration)
Kubeless (our Kubernetes-native serverless solution)
Sealed Secrets (a tool to give #gitops the ability to manage secrets securely)

As new packages and operational workflows to manage Kubernetes applications emerge we envision adding the appropriate add-ons to Kubeapps so that anyone can configure their cluster to meet their specific needs. Sealed Secrets might seem a little odd in this mix, but we believe that a significant number of users will start moving to a declarative mindset and will adopt a #gitops workflow like what is described by our friends from [Weave works](https://engineering.bitnami.com/articles/secure-gitops.html ).

Each add-on is defined in a jsonnet manifest available on GitHub. These manifests are turned into full YAML manifests and embedded in the code of `kubeapps`. This gives the ability to deploy the add-ons in a declarative manner, set labels, and configure garbage collection properly. A lot of the code that is in `kubeapps` was first introduced in our work on `kubecfg` as part of the ksonnet project. Once you download the binary you have two key commands to learn:

`kubeapps up` (will create all the required resources to make the add-ons work)
`kubeapps down` (if you wish to remove everything)

Here is a snapshot of the output of `kubeapps up`:

The third command in the Kubeapps CLI is:

`kubeapps dashboard`

This will connect you to a dashboard running in your cluster. This dashboard is based on Monocular as well but has the added functionality to deploy Helm Charts directly from the web interface. It also now integrates the Kubeless UI, making the Kubeapps dashboard a one stop shop for both Helm Charts and Serverless functions. Below is a snapshot of the Kubeless UI.

This is just the beginning for Kubeapps. As our friends from CoreOS mention in their 2018 predictions, 2 out of 5 critical areas are going to be Kubernetes applications and Serverless. With Kubeapps we are very excited at Bitnami to be addressing these needs already, offering a package agnostic launchpad for Kubernetes applications. One that brings serverless functions and any type of app formats together under one roof.

Look for an improved UI, more social features to build a great application hub for Kubernetes plus the ability to support declarative management of applications. This is going to be an exciting 2018 and Kubeapps is just the beginning.

Django 2.0 now available on Bitnami

2017-12-04T09:04:00.001-08:00

We are happy to announce the release of Django 2.0.

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that helps developers to design clean and rapid software. Python is a dynamic object-oriented programming language. The Bitnami Django Stack significantly simplifies the deployment of Django since it includes ready-to-run versions of Python, Django, MySQL and Apache.

Bitnami Django Stack includes Django 2.0 running over the latest version of Python 3.

You will find these features in this new release amongst others:

A simplified URL routing syntax that allows writing routes without regular expressions
A responsive, mobile-friendly contrib.admin
Window expressions to allow adding an OVER clause to querysets

You can visit the Django official releases notes for a full list of changes.

Do you want to try these new features? Deploy the Bitnami Django Stack in just one click. To get started, you can choose to run them on any of our all-in-one free native installers (for Linux, Windows and OS X) and virtual machines, or launch them in the cloud.

Launch Django 2.0 Now

Php 7.2 is now available on Bitnami

2017-11-30T06:10:00.000-08:00

PHP, one of the most popular programming languages, has just released a new major version. And now, we are thrilled to announce that PHP 7.2 is available in the Bitnami catalogue!

We have released WAMP, LAMP, LAPP, MAMP, MAPP installers, virtual machines, and AWS cloud images to support the new version of PHP in all platforms.

As a developer, some changes that might interest you are:

Convert numeric keys in object/array casts
Counting of non-countable objects
Object typehint
HashContext as Object
Argon2 in password hash
Improve TLS constants to sane values
Mcrypt extension removed
New sodium extension

Visit the PHP 7 change-log web page for more information about this release.

If you are interested in deploying PHP 7.2 in the AWS cloud, you can do it following this link:

Launch PHP 7.2 stack now

Meet the Founders: Chris Graham of Composr

2017-11-28T12:29:00.001-08:00

Chris Graham from Composr

We took some time to speak with the founder of Composr, which is available in the Bitnami library.

In this interview, Chris Graham talks about how Composr works, and where this application is going in our "Meet the Founder" interview.

Composr is a CMS with many social media features, for building modern, sophisticated websites. Composr supports many types of content (galleries, news/newsletters, etc.) – and integrating rich media and advertising into them. Social features include forums, member blogs, chat rooms, wiki, and content commenting/rating.

Composr lets you decide how your site will look and behave. Features are plentiful, but also optional. Feature integration is at the core of the Composr philosophy – for example, the site-wide search engine, and the unified member profiles.

1. Where do you see Composr CMS in 5/10 years time?

I think it’s important for everyone in the CMS industry to keep making content management easier. Most CMS developers focus on enterprise activity like multi-channel-delivery, or workflows. This makes for great sales and marketing, but the truth is what the vast majority of people (including people in enterprise) really care about is making website editing intuitive. Users don’t want to have to know any CSS to change their layouts, but users also want full control of it. Making websites used to be a lot easier when people used Microsoft Frontpage to do it. That was a long time ago and we obviously moved past that when we made websites more interactive – but I think ultimately we need to get back to this kind of simplicity of design editing.

This said, Composr is generally developed by feature sponsorship. Our customers pay us to implement what they need and we then release it to everyone in a future version. This is the core of how we are able to help a lot of people: everyone benefits from a shared investment pool (even those who just tag along as OSS users). Plus, it keeps us honest – my ideas about what need doing may be good, or they may be dead wrong – ultimately the real judge of what is important is what customers are willing to sponsor. I often come up with grand ideas about making things easier that would take years of development to achieve, but then a customer identifies just one thing that we can do that makes them (and many others) much more productive. Only a customer really knows what is most important to them.

2. What advantage does Composr CMS have over its competitors?

Most other Open Source systems have a big dependency on third-party plugins to provide what is often pretty basic functionality. Because these plugins are produced by different developers, often just enthusiasts, there’s no single point of call to report bugs, get support, or just to have the confidence that things will be maintained. Plus there’s no guarantee things will play well together or fit together cleanly – different developers may have different design standards, different terminology, and overlapping territory.

Meanwhile, most commercial systems are very expensive and developed in a bit of a bubble.

We design all our features together, and then allow people to pick which to install. Even a non-developer can setup a CMS based site with blogs, galleries, forums, and custom databases, within a few minutes.

We like to think we have the advantages of both worlds – clean design, but free.

3. What are key milestones that must be achieved in the next 6-12 months?

We are releasing version 10.1 into beta very soon. This is a very major eCommerce upgrade which almost rewrites all that code. We’ve merged our “Point Store” and “eCommerce” functionality into a single system, meaning you can do stuff like sell banner advertising direct on your site or access to particular content categories, things which used to only be available for members purchasing using community points. I feel it’s really important to make sure that regular enthusiasts and small businesses can make money on their sites in a variety of ways; currently sites are much too reliant 3rd-party-brokered advertising being the only revenue source.

Within 12 months we hope to release version 11 which is an enormous upgrade. I don’t want to talk too much about that though as we are very much focusing on making sure the experience with version 10 is great, with many new tutorials and community support.

4. Do you see Composr CMS as an underdog?

We’re definitely nowhere near as well known as systems like Wordpress or Drupal. However we don’t really think of ourselves as an underdog. We’re a self-sustaining project with a unique approach and really happy users, that’s enough.

We haven’t taken VC money like the big CMSs, we want to be able to focus on the needs of our users really honestly, and our feature sponsorship business model allows that. If we took the big money we’d be either slimming down to a common-denominator product that makes only basic things easy – or we’d be just chasing down high-budget enterprise projects and neglecting the typical user. This is what anyone can see if they look at the other CMSs and what I always wanted to avoid. That’s not to say there’s anything inherently wrong with VC money, I just think it doesn’t fit well to power the mid-tier CMS market.

Our growth must be based on us serving the needs of our core user-base. That is, users who want to build ambitious websites without having to hire a full development team to do so.

5. What advice would you give yourself before founding Composr CMS?

I'm an extremely analytical person, and I think in business this is both an asset and a curse (like being on any extreme probably). I want to help and to understand everything, and I want to take any bit of feedback very seriously. However, feedback contradicts other feedback, and often contradicts the business reality. You have to be able to somehow get into people's heads and see where they're coming from (customers have a lot to teach you, stay humble), and then translate back to a business that is grounded in reality. Few people realise how we’re all deeply embedded within our own bubbles.

One of the unusual things about my business is we are working across just about every social division you can imagine. We have users in many different countries, speaking many languages, from many cultures, from many socioeconomic groups, with many goals, with many different personality types, and with many different skill sets. That's actually intentional, we want to be a melting pot that brings together diverse ideas and resources to forge innovation. But it makes it enormously challenging.

A practical example of a challenge we face on a daily basis:

We get new business leads from people who expect quotes of $100, but we also get leads who expect quotes of $100,000.

If we quote $1,000 to a customer who expects $100, they may often be really hacked off. Because business costings just aren't something in their world view, they're used to working in a world where service costs don't go over double digits. If you give a quote to someone above what they can afford that can cut to the centre of someone's ego - you're basically telling them that they're inadequate. And this is very understandable when you really think about it; most people are not in a privileged class or an enterprise leadership role.

If you underquote an enterprise project, that could obviously lead to bankruptcy. Things really can get very complex, and therefore very expensive. You can take weeks just building proposals for these kinds of projects.

So, when do you spend a good chunk of time analyzing a project in detail, versus when do you gently tell an enthusiastic blameless person that their project is best simplified into an out-of-the-box installation and point them towards community support? While keeping everyone happy and without being prejudicial, that is.

To do it right I have to have at least a bit of awareness of every social and business sphere, and then somehow decide what particular 'world' any individual exists in, and interact with them as a member of that world. To do that well requires a very good understanding of psychology and sociology. Maybe other people can do it more intuitively, but as a nerd it's a really big challenge to me - and honestly it can be very hard to initially tell the difference between a nerdy enthusiast and a millionaire businessman, in my experience they both exude similar passion and use similar language.

So my advice is either:

1) Pick a niche and stick to it, target all your resources to a world where everyone thinks in roughly the same way. Probably most business people reading this are already screaming this advice at me, it’s the normal way to run a business.

2) Or, start from this understanding that reality is really subjective and spend the time to really understand the reality someone exists in.

I still prefer ‘2’, while incredibly challenging, I think our ecosystem and product is much richer for being so multi-faceted. Plus it’s more fun!

Either/Or Questions:

1. Coffee or tea?

Fruit tea. I am a recovering energy drink fiend, I used to drink lots of Red Bull, but I had to stop as it was giving me health problems.

2. PC or MAC?

I’ve been a Mac user for quite a while now. But at this point Microsoft have caught up, so if I were to buy a new machine, I’d likely buy an ultra-high-quality Windows machine for the same cash as a standard iMac. I also work with a dozen different Linux machines each week. Actually I grew up using a BBC Micro and then an Acorn Archimedies (the UK used to have its own computing industry, and actually this turned into ARM, what now powers all our smartphones).

3. Early bird or night owl?

I’m definitely a night owl. Working without distractions, including sunlight, really helps me get stuff done.

4. Bagels or muffins?

Neither. As a European I like my Pain au Chocolat (usually “Chocolate Croissants” in the US).

5. Detailed or abstract?

Both. I have the INTJ personality type, so I think pretty abstractly and broadly. However, you just can’t lack having attention to detail, it’s so important. I read a dozen books on design to force some of the programmer biases out of me.

6. Javascript or C?

They’re both badly designed languages that we’re stuck with. Javascript is full of inconsistencies, and C is almost designed for creating security holes. I’m going to cheat and say C#, now that’s a really nicely designed language that is also practical.

Try Composr on Bitnami as an Installer, Virtual Machine, or Cloud Image now!

Elasticsearch and ELK 6.0

2017-11-28T08:48:00.001-08:00

We are happy to announce a new version of the Bitnami Elasticsearch and ELK Stacks:

Elasticsearch is a popular open source, distributed, enterprise-quality search and analytics engine. Accessible through a REST API, it sifts through large amounts of data extremely quickly. ELK also includes Logstash (centralized logging, log enrichment, and parsing) and Kibana (powerful and beautiful data visualizations).

Launch Elasticseach server Now Launch ELK server Now

Here are some of the most remarkable new features and enhancements included in Elasticsearch 6:

Rolling Restart feature negates the need for a full cluster restart, minimizing downtime.
Sorting at indexing time.
New indices will be restricted to a single type (first step to remove mapping types).
Based on Lucene 7, it supports Sparse Doc Values.
More successful and efficient shard recovery.

To learn more information about this release, visit the ELK Stack upgrade page.

Do you want to try these new features? Deploy the Bitnami Elasticsearch and ELK Stack in just one click. To get started, you can choose to run them on any of our all-in-one free native installers (for Linux, Windows and OS X) and virtual machines, or launch them in the cloud.

And for the most demanding environments, you can also try Bitnami Elasticsearch Multi-Tier, already available on Google Cloud Platform or Azure.

See you at Kubecon 2017!

2017-11-27T12:41:00.001-08:00

Kubecon is around the corner and we’re pumped up for this year’s event. We’ll be exhibiting, conducting training, speaking, announcing an exciting new project, and of course meeting with loads of customers, partners and friends. For those of you who are headed to Kubecon in Austin this year (and even if you are not), we wanted to provide a summary of the main activities that we’ve got going on.

New Bitnami Kubernetes Project

As you know, Bitnami is leading the charge in defining how containers and functions will be packaged and delivered for Kubernetes. Building on Bitnami’s contributions to leading open source projects (Helm, Monocular, Kubeless and more) and leveraging our expertise in application packaging, we’ll be launching a new tool that provides a complete application delivery environment that empowers users to launch, review and share applications all from within a Kubernetes cluster.

Visit bitnami.com or follow us on social media for more details coming Dec 4th.

Speaking Session: Building Serverless Application Pipelines
Thursday, December 7 • 11:55am - 12:30pm

Session Description: The serverless paradigm is bringing a new type of applications to the forefront of application architecture. Distributed, containerized, scalable, event-driven and ephemeral with fine grained billing. In this talk we will go through several application use-cases that are driving the serverless movement (e.g data processing, IoT, mobile-backends, machine learning) and demonstrate how these applications can be developed and deployed on top of Kubernetes using an open source serverless solution called kubeless. Through live demos and examples, we will show that Kubernetes with its rich and stable core API is the perfect platform to build FaaS solutions.

Add this talk to your KubeCon schedule now!

Live Training: Kubernetes Core Concepts
Tuesday, December 5 • 8:30am - 5:00pm

This one-day course serves as a crash course to learn the basics of Kubernetes right before KubeCon NA. You will discover the Kubernetes architecture and how to install it. You will then learn how to use its basic primitives (i.e pods, deployments and services) to build your own distributed application. The course will be a mix of lectures, demos and hands-on exercises.

There are only a few spots left, so be sure to add this training to your ticket before it is too late!

Booth Activities
Visit us at Booth #S24

Join us at the Bitnami booth for a demo of any of our Kubernetes projects, to see simple ways to launch applications in your cluster, or just to chat about how you are using Kubernetes and how we can help. We’ll have a few featured slots with our partners at Weaveworks and an exclusive book signing of the soon to be released Kubernetes Cookbook from O’Reilly Media, authored by our very own Sebastien Goasguen.

Live Booth Demos: GitOps using Weave Cloud Deploy And Bitnami's Sealed Secrets

Come to the Weavework booth or Bitnami booth at the times below to learn how to secure GitOps using Weave Cloud Deploy And Bitnami's Sealed Secrets, and ask the experts any questions that you might have.

Demo at Weaveworks Booth at 10:45 am on Wednesday, December 6th
Demo at Bitnami Booth at 10:45 am on Thursday, December 7th

Live Booth Demos: Securing Kubeless function endpoints using cert-manager, by Jetstack

Come to the Bitnami booth to meet James Munnelly, from Jetstack, demonstrate how you can use cert-manager to automatically secure your Kubeless function endpoints, and discuss the opportunities that Kubernetes-native TLS certificates opens for your own stack too!

Demo at Bitnami Booth at 3:30 pm on Wednesday, December 6th

Book Signing

O’Reilly Kubernetes Cookbook book signing at 7:00 pm -8:00 pm on Wednesday December 6th

Looking forward to seeing many of you there!

TIBCO JasperReports 6.4.2 security release

2017-11-16T08:05:00.000-08:00

TIBCO JasperReports has recently been updated to fix two security vulnerabilities in the application.

Versions 6.4.0, 6.3.2, 6.3.1, 6.3.0 and 6.2.3 and below contain a vulnerability which may allow a subset of authorized users to perform persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. Version 6.4.0 is also affected by a vulnerability which fails to prevent remote access to the contents of the web application, including key configuration files. More information about these security issues can be found in the official advisories:

https://www.tibco.com/support/advisories/2017/11/tibco-security-advisory-november-15-2017-tibco-jasperreports-2017-5532
https://www.tibco.com/support/advisories/2017/11/tibco-security-advisory-november-15-2017-tibco-jasperreports-server-2017

TIBCO has released updated versions of the affected components which address these issues. For new application deployments, including the Bitnami Launchpad, we have released JasperReports 6.4.2 containers, installers, virtual machines and cloud images that include the security fixes to address these vulnerabilities. Users launching Bitnami JasperReports via a cloud marketplace are advised to select version 6.4.2, once it is published.

If you have further questions about this security issue or about Bitnami JasperReports, please post in our community forum. Our support team will be happy to help you there!

WordPress 4.9 is now available on Bitnami

2017-11-16T03:05:00.000-08:00

WordPress, the most popular open source CMS has just released the “best release ever” in their own words (188 enhancements and new features has been added). And now, WordPress 4.9 is available in the Bitnami catalogue.

Launch a WordPress server Now

Here are some of the most remarkable new features and enhancements included in this WordPress version:

New widgets and improvements

In addition to the new media widgets included in the prior version, version 4.9 also includes a Gallery widget for adding galleries both in the post content and in the sidebar.

New Gallery widget for post content and sidebar

We can highlight that this new version (at last!) support shortcodes in the text widget. The theme switching has also been enhanced.

Improvements for customizing sites

WordPress has improved the experience of discover, install and preview new themes on the customizer. The Nav Menu side has been also upgraded: a more clear menu panel that facilitates adding a new menu to the desired location.

Changes on the Nav Menu based on user experience tests

Code with more security and reliability

WordPress has reintroduced syntax highlighting and includes linting and auto-completion by incorporating the CodeMirror library. Apart from this, the Additional CSS Integration also incorporates the detention of syntax errors.

CodeMirror supports linting to detect errors in your code

This new version has a bunch of updates that you can’t miss. New interesting changes for developers in WordPress Multisite (which is also available in the Bitnami catalogue) or new capabilities for plugins and language files amongst others, are waiting for you.

You can deploy Bitnami WordPress 4.9 in just a few clicks:

Download it for installers and virtual machines.
Run your WordPress server in the cloud: Google Cloud Platform, AWS, Azure and others.

And for the most demanding environments, you can also try Bitnami WordPress Multi-Tier which separates the application code from the database. It is available on Google Cloud Platform, Azure or AWS.

Roundcube 1.3.3 security release

2017-11-10T09:46:00.002-08:00

The RoundCube project has recently discovered a file disclosure vulnerability in Roundcube Webmail.

Apparently this zero-day exploit is already being used by hackers to read Roundcube’s configuration files. It requires a valid username/password as the exploit only works with a valid session. More details will be published soon under CVE-2017-16651. RoundCube versions 1.1.x are affected by this vulnerability. However, versions 1.0.x, that are not affected by it, have been patched with the same fix as well.

We advise you to check your Roundcube installation to see if it has been compromised. Please check the Apache access logs (installdir/apache2/logs/access_log) for requests like:

?_task=settings&_action=upload-display&_from=timezone

More information about this vulnerability can be found in the official announcement.

For new application deployments, including the Bitnami Launchpad, we have released Roundcube 1.3.3 installers, virtual machines and cloud images that include the security fixes to address this vulnerability. Users launching Bitnami Roundcube via a cloud marketplace are advised to select version 1.3.3, once it is published.

If you have further questions about this security issue or about Bitnami Roundcube, please post to our community forum. Our support team will be happy to help you there!

Announcing Bitnami WordPress Multi-tier with Amazon Aurora

2017-11-09T15:09:00.001-08:00

Bitnami is the leading publisher of free and open source software in the AWS Marketplace, the online store where AWS users can find thousands of software titles to run in their cloud accounts. Our mission is to make awesome software available to everyone, everywhere by publishing fully configured, secure, and up-to-date applications and development stacks. In keeping with that goal, we are proud to announce our new WordPress Multi-tier with Amazon Aurora, now available in AWS Marketplace!

Using the Cloud Formation Template (CFT) written by Bitnami, you can now deploy a WordPress instance with all the features of Amazon Aurora right through the AWS Marketplace. Like all Bitnami apps, it is completely pre-configured and can be deployed in just a few clicks.

Aurora is a relational database service provided by Amazon. We have replaced the MySQL server we would typically package in a WordPress image, using Aurora as a separate database tier instead. When you deploy the CFT through the AWS Marketplace, it automatically provisions a new Aurora instance that is pre-networked and configured to work with the WordPress application instance running in EC2.

Why does this matter?

A single-VM WordPress instance works great for lower-traffic sites used for small businesses or personal websites. For websites that need to handle a substantial amount of traffic, a more robust architecture may be necessary. Separating the database into a separate layer enables you to run your database on machines designed for that purpose, as well as manage them independently of the application layer. It also gives you more control over how you administer the application and web server.

What makes our new WordPress with Aurora exciting is that Aurora gives you the performance of a high-end database with costs similar to what you pay for regular EC2 usage (in other words, inexpensive). According to Amazon, Aurora delivers five times the throughput of standard MySQL at a tenth the cost. It is highly available with up to 15 low-latency read replicas, can be replicated across up to three availability zones, and comes with fault-tolerant and self-healing distributed storage out-of-the-box. Using Aurora for the database removes the need to handle administrative tasks like backups, updates, and patches as well- it all happens automatically, behind the scenes.

Configuring a WordPress instance with all of the same functionality you get with the Bitnami WordPress with Amazon Aurora used to be a difficult process that would be daunting even for an expert. You can now get a production-ready WordPress website up and running, and ready to handle large amounts of traffic, in a matter of minutes.

Give it a try, and let us know in the comments what you think!

Security Release: CouchDB 2.1.1

2017-11-09T10:20:00.000-08:00

The CouchDB project has just announced the immediate availability of a new version that fixes multiple critical security vulnerabilities.

The detailed description of those security vulnerabilities will not be published until November 14th, but updating the server is mandatory. It is highly recommended that you update your CouchDB server to 2.1.1.

Apart from those vulnerabilities, the new version includes several improvements. More information about these improvements can be found in the official announcement.

For new application deployments, including the Bitnami Launchpad, we have released CouchDB 2.1.1 installers, virtual machines and cloud images that include the security fixes to address these vulnerabilities. Users launching Bitnami CouchDB via a cloud marketplace are advised to select version 2.1.1, once it is published.

If you have further questions about this security issue or how to update your Bitnami CouchDB, please post to our community forum. Our support team will be happy to help you!

Introducing Bitnami Kubernetes Sandbox- A Complete Kubernetes Environment - Prepackaged and Ready-to-Run in the Cloud

2017-11-02T08:04:00.001-07:00

At Bitnami, some of the most popular applications we package are developer tools and infrastructure tools. And if you follow Bitnami at all you are aware of the investments we’re making in Kubernetes, from the acquisition of Skippbox to developing and launching our own projects and our ongoing collaborations with other Kubernetes thought leaders. (We’re even doing joint Kubernetes training sessions with the team from Google.)

Put those two together and you’ll see why the most recent addition to our application catalog is a pre-packaged Kubernetes cluster that delivers the same simple, ready-to-run, click-to-deploy, always-secure-and-up-to-date goodness you’ve come to expect from every other Bitnami application you are using today.

Introducing – Bitnami Kubernetes Sandbox!

One package and you get everything you need to quickly launch a Kubernetes cluster in AWS, Oracle Cloud, or Google Cloud. Bitnami Kubernetes Sandbox is designed to be the easiest way to deploy a Kubernetes cluster in the cloud to give users as close to a production workflow as possible.

If you are looking for the perfect environment to learn Kubernetes and to test your containerized applications, this is it!

The Bitnami Kubernetes Sandbox includes:

Heapster and Grafana for performance monitoring and visualization.
Ingress Controller for making your applications accessible using port 80 and 443.
Helm for deploying charts in your cluster.
Dynamic Local Volume provisioning so you can work with persistence.
Kubernetes Dashboard for easy cluster management.
RBAC authorization enabled by default.

Are you ready to launch your Kubernetes Sandbox?

Deploy to Amazon, Google or Oracle from the Bitnami Launchpad.

Check out the documentation for AWS, Oracle Cloud and Google Cloud here.

And be sure to let us know what you think at https://bitnami.com/stack/kubernetes-sandbox.

Tweet, like, write a review…whatever you prefer!

Meet the Bitnami Team: Brad Bock

2017-10-04T17:50:00.000-07:00

The Bitnami team is a diverse group of talented people distributed all over the world. Get to know them better through this series of blog posts.

Brad is the Program Manager for Cloud Partnerships on the Business Development team, and works from our San Francisco office.

A brief bio

I come from Southern California, where I grew up obsessed with reading, playing music, and trying to figure out how things like small engines and radios worked by taking them apart and (sometimes successfully) putting them back together again. I had an entrepreneurial streak from a very young age as well, and by the time I was 12 I had cornered the neighborhood market on lawn-mowing and car-washing.

Around that same time I also discovered computers when my parents got our first desktop PC, a Tandy 386 with Windows 3.1 and a 14.4kbps modem purchased from Radio Shack. I was totally hooked- the ability to communicate with people all over the world was extremely interesting, not to mention that I could program it to do my math homework!

When I was a little older, I needed some help paying for college so I joined the US Navy. That took me all over the world, working in intelligence for a certain three-letter agency and feeding my passion for experiencing and learning about other cultures. After the Navy, I moved back to SoCal to study economics and philosophy. I met my future wife, Tiffany, and went to work in the motion picture industry after graduating. We eventually decided it was too damn hot in Southern California, and made the decision to move to the Bay Area where Tiff grew up.

Why you joined Bitnami and what excites you about working here?

During my time working in the movie industry, Tiff and I started building websites using WordPress and shared hosting. Before long, I was also hosting our websites to save some money… and not long after that I had a nice little side hustle building and hosting other websites for friends, family, and small businesses.

When we moved to the Bay, I was looking for a way to host WordPress websites in the cloud and happened across Bitnami. I immediately knew this was the company I wanted to work for- they made it so easy to deploy all these open source apps in the cloud, I was kicking myself for not finding them earlier! Now that I’ve been here a couple years, I’ve realized how tremendously exciting open source software is, and how much good Bitnami does for everyone from individual tinkerers to corporate titans by making it more accessible and flexible to use. Now we are doing some next-level s#$& with our application packaging toolchain, Docker, and Kubernetes that is going to have a significant impact on the way big companies adopt tomorrow’s cloud technology. It is almost surreal working at a company this size that can justifiably say that.

When I think back about the things that didn’t exist when I was a kid, and daydream about the things my own kids will take for granted, I get really excited about working for Bitnami. How cool is it that my (currently gestating) child will have the opportunity to start coding around the time he learns to write his name, and that some of the same technologies used to run the coolest tech companies will be at his fingertips to play with on a whim. Imagine the things the next couple generations are going to come up with! I feel that Bitnami’s raison d’etre is removing barriers to that future, and I am excited to be part of it.

The other thing that excites me most is working with such a diverse, talented, and humorous group of people from around the globe, among whom I am very sure many will be lifelong friends. I feel proud to work at a company where people are welcome and accepted whatever their age, sex/sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, etc. I’m not just saying that because it sounds good- it is a very important issue to me, and I feel that as a company we’re getting it right.

What are you working on?

I wear a lot of hats at Bitnami; a little bit of product, a little marketing, some account management, design, you name it. Officially, I am a Program Manager for Cloud Partnerships; formerly I worked in a similar role with ISVs and then Systems Integrators.

It’s my job to be an expert in every aspect of Bitnami’s technology and business. I’ve always got my eyes open for opportunities to help people unlock value in their relationships with us.

What do you like to do for fun?

Enjoying the night market in Taipei

I am really interested in making things to eat and drink that were once made at home but are now almost universally mass-produced. I have become a one-man cottage industry of sorts, producing some fine home-made beer, smoked sausages, cheese, and other delicious treats. I am also obsessed with travel and meeting interesting people around the world, and especially sampling the many wonderful things to eat and drink.

When I’m not chasing new adventures around the globe, there’s nothing better than hanging out with family and friends (and four-legged friends), cooking out and enjoying each other’s company at home.

Interested in working with Bitnami and Brad? Apply for one of our open positions!

Bitnami User Survey Part 3: Containers Orchestration War or Peace?

2017-10-02T12:11:00.000-07:00

We’ve all seen the many articles and blogs about container orchestration wars. Is that a vendor war? a user war? or not a war at all? I’m always interested in a good fight but I’m not sure there is one here. Our data seems to show there might not be a skirmish or even a scuffle, in fact it looks more like a peace treaty with the happy coexistence of multiple container orchestration services and solutions.

In part 3 of our user survey blog series, I wanted to expand on something we discovered in reviewing the results related to container orchestration adoption…that in over 40% of cases, container users reported using more than one orchestration solution, with some users reportedly using as many as 5. (two people actually reported using 7 !!!)

Figure 1. Number of Container Orchestrators Used

There are several logical explanation for this: 1. they are being used to manage workloads in different clouds 2. users are evaluating multiple solutions side-by-side to determine which will best fit their need 3. they're using different solutions to solve different use-cases.

To understand this better, we broke down the data even further to look at the number of orchestration solutions reportedly being used within each of the container services from the big public cloud providers.

Figure 2. Container Orchestration by Cloud Container Service

Key Data:

1. Amazon ECS uses are the most likely to have standardized on a single orchestrator.

2. Azure Container Service users are slightly more likely to be using more than one orchestrator

(this is perhaps reflecting the fact that ACS supports Kubernetes, Mesosphere or Swarm.)

Another interesting way to look at these results is by evaluating how orchestration solution adoption is distributed from single solution to multi-solution environments. Of course, the single solution leader will be some indication of a selection of a preferred platform but more interesting should be the distribution among users claiming multiple platforms. We know that from pure number of users that Kubernetes is the leading container orchestration tool (See Container Trends - Bitnami User Survey Part 2). What is interesting is that it is not the most widely chosen solution among those only using one, that position belongs to Docker Swarm.

Figure 3. Container Orchestration Usage by Solution

Key Data:

1. Amongst the container orchestration projects Swarm seems to have “platform loyalty” in the same way ECS does

2. People who are using Kubernetes are also using Swarm and AWS ECS, perhaps to cover different use-cases inside their organizations.

While not explicitly covered in the survey we can connect anecdotal data from customer conversations that suggests that Docker-compose/Swarm is more commonly used for development whereas Kubernetes or ECS is used more frequently in production.

If you are making a decision on where to invest as you build out a container strategy or you’re looking for tools that can help you manage your Kubernetes environment, you’ve come to the right place. Bitnami can get you started on your journey with pre-packaged container images from our vast catalog of ready-to-run applications and we’re actively developing a contributing to a number of leading edge Kubernetes projects.

Stay tuned for more from our 2017 Bitnami user survey.

TensorFlow Serving Now Available in Bitnami!

2017-09-27T21:26:00.000-07:00

Interested in experimenting with machine learning, or looking to add image recognition to your own application stack? Bitnami is pleased to announce that doing so just got easier, with the release of TensorFlow Serving with Inception-v3 framework!

TensorFlow Serving was developed and open sourced by the Google Brain team in 2015. It uses a standard architecture and set of APIs on which you can deploy machine learning algorithms, and is compatible with both TensorFlow models such as Inception-v3 and other types of models and data.

The Bitnami TensorFlow Serving stack comes with the Inception-v3 framework pre-installed and configured. Inception-v3 was developed for classifying complete images into 1,000 classes (such as llama, zebra, aircraft carrier, or even Pembroke Welsh Corgi) as part of the ImageNet Large Visual Recognition Challenge. You can use TensorFlow Serving for tasks like captioning images out-of-the-box, or you can add/create your own models and serve them instead.

We have a number of get started guides for using TensorFlow Serving in the cloud, on your Linux laptop, or even on your Kubernetes cluster! It has never been easier to start experimenting with this exciting technology, and the software is absolutely free to use. Give it a try!

Meet the Bitnami team: Sameer Naik

2017-09-27T17:57:00.000-07:00

The Bitnami team is a diverse group of talented people distributed all over the world. Get to know them better through this series of blog posts.

Sameer is an Engineer on the Kubernetes team, and works remotely from Goa, India.

A brief bio

I am from and India, living in the beautiful state of Goa. As a young boy I loved tinkering with electronics. I would often take them apart and put them back together. I had my first experience with computers at an early age (it was a PC with 233 MHz and 16 MB RAM running Windows 95) and I would often watch my brother try to get Linux running on it and write computer programs for it. My journey in the world of computer science had begun as soon as I started to write code myself.

After graduating with a Computer Science degree, I co-founded a hardware startup to work on multimedia devices and developing the software stack for the platforms. I enjoyed the startup work culture and after some very memorable years, I decided to pursue my new found interest in cloud and container technologies and found Bitnami to be the perfect fit to start my new journey.

Why did you join Bitnami and what excites you about working here?

When I came across Docker, I was fascinated by the potential of Linux containers in the software development and delivery life cycle. I began experimenting with the tool and in the process published images for GitLab and Redmine, which became very popular in the Docker community.

I wanted to learn more about software delivery, container orchestration and cloud platforms and in the process came across Bitnami. From that point, it was clear that Bitnami was the place where I could learn more about these technologies.

The container landscape has evolved rapidly and I am proud to say that Bitnami has made significant contributions in the space with its efforts around the Kubernetes, Helm projects, and more! We have been hiring some amazing engineers and our team has grown significantly over the last year as well, which has been exciting to see.

What are you working on?

I am a part of the Kubernetes team at Bitnami. Our sole focus is to always improve our offerings in the container space. We are very proud of the Kubeless and Monocular projects that we have contributed to the Kubernetes community and will continue to enhance the user experience for these tools.

Our team has contributed significantly to the Helm project and are consistently engaged with the user community to understand how users are deploying Linux containers in their infrastructure.

What do you like to do for fun?

I enjoy the company of my pets. I have four dogs, which is a lot fun. I am a avid gym goer and try to workout as often as possible.

I love food, especially middle eastern cuisine. Like every foodie, this one likes to cook.

I am a self taught guitarist and played in a college rock band. It's been a really really long time since I last touched a guitar. I intend to pick it up again soon :)

I have become interested in blockchain technologies and often spend time exploring the exciting new world of blockchain products and services.

Interested in working with Bitnami and Sameer? Apply for one of our open positions!

7 Bitnami Engineers Among the First Certified Kubernetes Administrators

2017-09-26T12:26:00.000-07:00

At Bitnami, we have been packaging applications for over a decade and we see application deployment as a continuum from bare metal, VMs, cloud images, containers even through to serverless. We made an early bet that Kubernetes was going to be the dominant orchestrator for containers in production and have been leading a number of Kubernetes projects that are simplifying packaging and deployment. (check out kubeapps.com for 100+ ready-to-run kubernetes helm charts) As we built in-house expertise, we started training our users and customers at industry events and through an ongoing webinar series throughout 2017. So naturally when the Linux Foundation announced the start of their Kubernetes Certified Service Program we jumped at the chance to participate.

Kubernetes Certified Service Provider Requirements:

Three or more engineers passing the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam
Demonstrable activity in the Kubernetes community including active contribution, and a business model that supports enterprise end users including putting engineers at a customer site

Our Kubernetes team went above and beyond the requirement by having 7 of our engineerspass the CKA exam, 3 of which are our Kubernetes trainers.

22 companies were included in the founding class, and we are proud to say that Bitnami was one of them. Along with names such as Canonical, Huawei, and IBM, Bitnami is trusted partner of the Kubernetes ecosystem that can provide Kubernetes support to the world’s leading enterprise companies.

“As Kubernetes has grown, so has the demand from enterprises needing expert services and support. Enterprises working with KCSPs can be confident the partner they’ve chosen to work with has the training and skills needed to help them succeed with Kubernetes.” - Dan Kohn, Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, in the Linux Foundation Press Release.

Along with our continued contributions to the project, our KCSP certified trainers look forward to spreading their Kubernetes knowledge to enterprises around the world with our customized and detailed training offerings.

If your team is in need of Kubernetes training by a KCSP provider,
please reach out to us!

Meet the Team: Victor Tuson Palau

2017-09-21T06:43:00.002-07:00

The Bitnami team is a diverse group of talented people distributed all over the world. Get to know them better through this series of blog posts

Victor is the Director of Engineering, and works from our Sevilla Office.

A brief bio

I was born and raised in Barcelona. Growing up, I was always keen to learn about how things worked. My interest was equally divided between technology and nature. So much so, that the decision to do engineering came a few days before submitting my university choices. I set Computer Networks as first choice, followed by Veterinary Medicine as second. Luckily for the animal kingdom, I got my first choice.

Another of my passions is learning new cultures, so to complete my final-year degree project, I moved to England for 6 months… long-story short: I stayed there for 17 years, married an English woman and had two kids. In between, my wife and I managed to fit in 18 months living and working in India.

Enjoying some outdoor time with the family

I soon discovered that although I liked engineering, I really loved working with engineers and helping them build awesome products. Over the years, I worked in the mobile phone industry (Nortel,Symbian and Nokia) before moving towards Open Source.

Before Bitnami, I was the Vice President of Customer Engineering at Canonical, helping our commercial partners to build and ship Ubuntu products.

Why you joined Bitnami and what excites you about working here?

Serverless, Containers and Kubernetes - these are three technologies that are changing the landscape of cloud computing. Bitnami is doing amazing work to bring our highly successful one-click-deployment developer offering from our installers and cloud instances to them. That was what got me talking to Bitnami.

It was meeting the fantastic engineering team in Seville that convinced me to jump on a plane and move to the South of Spain with my family. I am extremely lucky to cycle to the office every day through a city packed with Unesco World Heritage sites, and come to work in a start up packed with world-class professionals, both in our offices in Seville, San Francisco, and our remotely located colleagues. It also doesn't hurt having two very talented founders at the helm of the company! They provide a very crisp and exciting vision for our business and technology.

What are you working on?

As Director of Engineering, my role is to support the team in shipping products and becoming more efficient in the process.

For example, we have just added 4 new database multi-VM cluster solutions to our catalog. We are able to keep growing our catalog by investing in automation and improvements every iteration. Often, the most valuable feedback comes from our community forums and we make sure we help everyone who has a question.

The most important asset in Bitnami are our people; right now I am working with our Director of Operations to roll out improved practices in order to support engineers continuous learning and growth. With these programs, we focus on product, project and people skills and depending on their career choice, we help them achieve the right balance between the three.

I spend a large part of my time on our selection process. We are growing! Hiring the right people to enrich the team’s culture and skills is very important to me. We are looking for engineers for our assets (packaging and CI automation), tools development (golang), and Kubernetes teams.

What do you like to do for fun?

I just moved to Seville, so a lot of my spare time is spent wandering about Seville, visiting places and trying out new restaurants with friends. When it gets too hot, I have fun with my kids in the local pool!

Interested in working with Bitnami and Victor? Apply for one of our open positions!

Bitnami Application Catalog Now Available in Open Telekom Marketplace

2017-09-12T10:53:00.002-07:00

Open Telekom Cloud users are now able to launch any of our 140+ optimized, trusted, and ready-to-run applications within their new marketplace! Bitnami is proud to be the first publisher of applications for the Open Telekom Cloud marketplace. Now, European customers are able to bring their workloads to Open Telekom Cloud through their marketplace and the Bitnami Launchpad.

Visit the Open Telekom Cloud Marketplace!

With our new partnership, we plan to provide current and interested customers with a series of resources that will highlight the value of Bitnami and Open Telekom Cloud joining forces. Starting this past week we launched a joint webinar series that is designed to highlight a set of popular applications from our catalog and the onboarding and user experience of the Open Telekom Cloud. If you missed our first webinar focused on common Devops tools, Thinking One Step Further with time-saving DevOps tools with Bitnami applications on Open Telekom Cloud? Watch the on-demand recording below:

For customers that may not be familiar with using open source software, Bitnami’s packaged application stacks provide added features and components to deliver everything you need out of the box. Bitnami ensures each application is:

Ready-to-Run – Pre-configured applications and development stacks
Up-to-date – Bitnami’s Application Catalog is continuously updated and secure
Optimized – Consistently configured for best performance on any platform
Trusted – Over 1 million Bitnami packaged applications are deployed per month

Along with providing secure, up-to-date, optimized applications, Open Telekom Cloud keeps their customer’s needs in mind by providing a platform that meets German data privacy & compliance regulations and even the upcoming European General Data Protection Regulation, all while enjoying the benefits and flexibility of using the cloud.

New to Open Telekom Cloud? Sign up and receive 250 Euro!

Meet the Bitnami Team: Miranda Carter

2017-09-06T15:14:00.000-07:00

The Bitnami team is a diverse group of talented people distributed all over the world. Get to know them better through this series of blog posts

Miranda is the Operations Manager on the Operations team, and works remotely from Vancouver, Washington.

A brief bio

While I was in college, I took advantage of all of the internships that I could to enhance my skill set and narrow down all of the possible roles that I wanted to do in the workforce. As I went through each of my internships, I realized that I loved being a part of a company that was fast paced and was still in the stage of process creation instead of process enforcement.

As soon as I graduated, I started to look for my first full time job within start-ups, which is how I ended up at Bitnami as their Office Manager.

When I started 4 years ago, we had about 20 employees worldwide with only 5 of us in the San Francisco office that I managed. It was such an exciting time because I was able to learn first-hand about how the company ran while also helping to mold the company culture into a place that would now grow to over 70 people!

As our team has grown, so has my role. I am now the Operations Manager for the San Francisco office. My team covers the needs of our US-based team and all of our remote workers as well.

Why you joined Bitnami and what excites you about working here?

When looking for my new adventure, I was speaking with a few companies and Bitnami was the only one that really grabbed my attention. I knew that I wanted to work for a start-up, but Bitnami was the only company that seemed to have an actually long term plan for success and they were the only founders that I truly wanted to learn from. As time went on, that gut feeling rang true since I have learned more than I could have ever imagined during my time here.

Although it has been almost 4 years, I am still here because the ability to always learn something new has not gone away. Even as the team grows, each employee is encouraged to ask questions and join projects that they are interested in. With this type of company culture, boredom and complacency isn’t an option because things move too fast for you to ever settle down.

Remote-based working culture is one of the biggest aspects of why I am still here as well. Due to family circumstances, I needed to move away from San Francisco and to Vancouver, WA. At first, I thought that I would need to leave the company because of the move, but it turned out that the remote-based culture that Bitnami had built was strong enough to even allow an Operations person to get the job done from anywhere in the world.

The transition from working in the office to working remotely was seamless since all of the employees now understand how to work with remote team members.

Of course, as someone who used to work in the office everyday, I miss seeing everyone in-person, but I know that I will see them at least a few times a year. Also, the founders know the importance of this type of connection, which is why we have in-person engineering sprints a few times a year and the infamous yearly company all-hands trip!

What are you working on?

My team covers many different aspects of the company in order to make sure that daily operations run smoothly such as human resources, office management, recruiting, events and much more.

One of my current projects is focused on building an internal resource center for all company documentation, which will help increase knowledge sharing between all employees. I am using a tool called WorkRamp (seriously, the best tool) to create a company portal that includes all internal information, from our company handbooks to our marketing guidelines, to ensure that every single employee is able to gather the information that they need in one spot.

Enjoying some time at the beach with her little "family"

What do you like to do for fun?

I am a dog and wine lover, so you can usually see me at an activity that includes either or both of those things during the weekend. One of my favorite places is the beach, so I am now spending the rest of the summer exploring the new Washington coast beaches that I haven’t been to before.

Interested in working with Bitnami and Miranda? Apply for one of our open positions!

Meet the Bitnami Team: JuanJo Ciarlante

2017-08-30T16:10:00.000-07:00

The Bitnami team is a diverse group of talented people distributed all over the world. Get to know them better through this series of blog posts

JuanJo is a Senior Site Reliability Engineer on the SRE team, which is part of the Kubernetes Squad, and works remotely from Argentina.

A brief bio

¿ Cómo funciona (How does it work) ?

I’ve been passionate about «how things work» since I was a child. I still recall how anxious I was when waiting for my father to bring home the latest issue of «Cómo funciona» magazine. Not surprisingly, many years later FOSS became the major driver in my career.

That token[ring card] that changed my life.

My 1st taste of Internet came thru a Metro-Area-Network at the govt department I was working at, c.a. 1995, in Mendoza/Argentina, where we got a “lease” for one of those shiny public IP addresses. Alas, it was linked via a single token-ring NIC installed in our Slackware Linux gateway box (an old IBM PS/2 we had recycled for that purpose). With no budget for a second TR NIC, several hundred dollars at that time and baby Linux 1.2 only supporting a single address per interface, it quickly became unsustainable to switch between our formal govt’s private address and the precious public one.

Hm … what about that ~2MB linux-1.3.xx.tar.gz source that’s written in that C language I had been tinkering with? After some weeks, many tries+rebuilds+crashes along the way, I had hacked up something beyond WFM, post-able to the linux-kernel mailing list -- with the help and feedback mainly from Alan Cox¹, we got ip_aliasing finally merged in linux-1.3.47 \o/

Since then I contributed to many other FOSS projects: Linux IP masquerading improvements, user/kernel space OpenSWAN crypto algo modularization, IPv6 transport support for OpenVPN, among other sparse bits.

Cloud-y times ahead.

In 2007 I joined Google at their Switzerland HQ as an SRE. By 2012 I had to return to my home country (was techlead of the GMail/Abuse-backends SRE team by that time) ... those times you’d want fork() to be a real-world thing.

Alas, an opportunity to work from home for Canonical had opened, which I was lucky enough to grab: joined as Webops/SRE, later CRE (Cloud-RE) to wheel OpenStack-s for fun and profit.

Being back home also allowed me to resume my courses at the Universidad de Mendoza - re-joining that synergy that comes from teaching↔learning.

During my career I had been so lucky to have great challenges, learn so much from my awesome colleagues, work+contribute to FOSS projects, what else could I ask for? →

Why you joined Bitnami and what excites you about working here?

→ Kubernetes

I’d been missing a rock-solid cloud orchestration platform (yeah, every Xoogler misses Google’s Borg I guess), but then Kubernetes came to life! Then Bitnami -- with its focus on the application orchestration realm together with its strong involvement in k8s projects in like kubeless, helm and ksonnet/kubecfg -- made a perfect fit for me :))

I also love the company-wide team culture, how horizontally you can approach managers and founders, it’s a great place to work !

What are you working on?

As member of the SRE team, we are involved in a pretty diverse set of devops tasks and projects, while also actively contributing to our Kubernetes efforts - for example, I recently added integration tests to kubeless, which ended being quite a trip (riding Travis to spawn a kubernetes cluster for your tests to land-on is an interesting challenge).

What do you like to do for fun?

Hmm guess that bash 1-liners don’t count here, so let’s try something else :#)

I love cooking (yeah you may say that’s meal-Engineering, but I’d like to convince myself that’s not only that ;). I also enjoy travelling to learn from other people’s culture, art and nature.

I’ve recently joined a local runners’ group, which gives another way to enjoy the beautiful hills surrounding Mendoza.

¹FWIW Interesting thoughts and discussion with Alan Cox: he pushing me to come up with something that would not require extra tools than ifconfig, then telling me why my original choice of ‘/’ as a shell-friendly aliased interface separator (i.e. no ‘|’, ‘$’, etc) was actually a bad idea - hmm not many choices left:
@ ←nah, so email-ish
% ←ditto (uucp routing, anyone?)
. ←meh looks like a file extension
: ←yeah, available! - plus there’s no such thing as drive-names on *nix OSes, after all ;)

Interested in working with Bitnami and JuanJo? Apply for one of our open positions!

Security Issue: RubyGems

2017-08-30T10:21:00.001-07:00

Ruby project has published a security advisory due to multiple moderate-severity vulnerabilities in RubyGems bundled by Ruby. The reported issues are:

A DNS request hijacking vulnerability
An ANSI escape sequence vulnerability
A DoS vulnerability in the query command
A vulnerability in the gem installer that allowed a malicious gem to overwrite arbitrary files

The following versions are affected:

Ruby 2.2.7 and earlier
Ruby 2.3.4 and earlier
Ruby 2.4.1 and earlier

At this time, there are no Ruby releases with the fix for RubyGems. It is strongly recommended to apply one of the following workarounds:

Upgrade RubyGems to the latest version (2.6.13) by executing:

$ gem update --system

Apply the patch for your version:

For Ruby 2.2.7: patch
For Ruby 2.3.4: patch
For Ruby 2.4.1: patch1 and patch2 (apply sequentially)

You can find more info about this issue in the links below:

RubyGems project
Hacker News

If you have further questions about Ruby or this security issue, please post to our community forums and we will be happy to help you.

Container Trends – Bitnami User Survey 2017 (Part 2)

2017-08-21T11:56:00.000-07:00

Survey Says: Kubernetes

Name the top 5 container orchestration solutions.

Meet the Bitnami Team: Marko Mikulicic

2017-08-17T19:18:00.000-07:00

The Bitnami team is a diverse group of talented people distributed all over the world. Get to know them better through this series of blog posts.

Marko Mikulicic is a Senior Engineer on Bitnami’s Toolchain team, and works remotely from Italy.

A brief bio

As a kid I liked to take everything apart to see how it works. But computers were different. When I was 8, putting my hands on one wasn't easy, given my track record. But once opened, the mystery just deepened.

Marko enjoying some time with his son

That machine, which allowed my father to stop keeping the neighbours awake with the clickety-clack of his old typewriter, was able to surprise me with its seemingly never ending amount of things it could do. Yet, all I could see was a bunch of quiet plastic bricks, not humming, not glowing, but nevertheless launching my 8-bit cannonballs over rasterized mountains hitting simulated walls of imaginary castles. Every game or application I saw triggered that instinct: take it apart and see how it works!

Like physicists discover how nature works, I was discovering the laws of this marvellous machine. I say discover, because while the knowledge was definitely out there, I first had to make sense of it: as a Croatian immigrant in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, I could only put my hands on the tech books from the country majority language. Thus, I co-learned German and C from the same book.

But C did no good. Non only it did not quench the thirst (too high level; what does the machine actually do!?), but the toolchain didn't fit in a single floppy drive. While forever flipping floppies on my shiny Amiga 500, I found a book about assembler and was happily programming in mc6800 assembly hereafter until hard drives finally came into town.

From there, I worked my way through a bit of everything: from academia to the industry, from applications to development tools, from writing compilers and interpreters to operating systems, from micro-optimizations to large scale design, from embedded development and hardware to working on the largest machine learning system on earth at Google.

Other than that, I lived in Switzerland, Croatia, Ireland and Italy. I have forgotten a lot of languages.

I have a 1 y/o son who makes me dream of sleeping.

Why you joined Bitnami and what excites you about working here?

I really like working on tools that make software engineers more productive, which is part of Bitnami’s overall mission. Software engineers love their tools and often have to build their own, either for fun or out of frustration. But there is not enough time to struggle with the same things over and over.

Nowadays most people don't assemble their own PCs and often they don't even install their OSs anymore; we can see how the same pattern can be applied further down on whole development and production environments, leaving you more time to actually focus on your own software and the many more interesting challenges you can face.

I believe Bitnami can make the difference here and give a lot of people that kickstart in productivity they need to build amazing things.

Plus, it's a fun place to work! I have worked in both small and large companies, so I know the pros and cons of both. Bitnami caught my attention because it is an interesting size, in an interesting moment, and has plenty of potential for solid foundations.

Bitnami is also full of people that come from very different experiences. Something that's new for you was well explored by someone else, and vice versa; this offers a lot of opportunities to stay curious and learn a lot of things.

Also, I had to relocate back to Italy for family reasons and I found that Bitnami had built a solid remote working culture that was compatible with my time zone.

What are you working on?

While Bitnami is sharing and contributing to lot of open source projects, like Helm, Kubeless and Cabin, the main thing is still the application catalog, packaged in many ways: VMs you can run on premises, cloud images readily available at your cloud provider of choice and containers you can run just everywhere.

These applications and infrastructure components which you can use to build your systems on are curated by skilled humans who try hard to make things just work so you can worry only about things that matter.

But then, we have hordes of little (software-based) Elves that do the grunt work of building, packaging, updating, testing, publishing, notifying, monitoring so that you can enjoy your click-to-deploy Mongodb cluster.

My job is to program those little subordinate clauses, telling them what to do and how to interact with each other, so that we can free up some valuable for humans to do what they (I mean, we) do better: be creative and apply judgement calls.

Building complex and dependable automation is fun and challenging. It's hard to draw the line between what should be automated and what not, and it's easy to fall in the trap of turning humans to log and graph watchers and mindless button pushers just because you cannot really trust the amazingly complex automation you just built. So much fun, much reward.

What do you like to do for fun?

I work for fun and live for a living.

Not work work, I mean, somehow I got dragged into this whole thing about farming and growing food, making my own olive oil etc; it's serious work! I even had to ferry donkeys across europe, twice.

Not wasting money on gyms; doing useful work as Joule intended instead!

I don't dismantle things anymore. Entropy does it for me.

When I had time, I used to be a musician. I also liked words.

When I grow up I want to be taller.

Interested in working with Bitnami and Marko? Apply for one of our open positions!

Security Release: Drupal 8.3.7

2017-08-17T11:29:00.001-07:00

Drupal has released a new version that fixes three security vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities affect Drupal versions prior to 8.3.7.

The vulnerabilities fixed in the latest version of Drupal (8.3.7) are the following:

Entity access bypass for entities that do not have UUIDs or have protected revisions - Access Bypass - Critical - CVE-2017-6925
Views - Access Bypass - Moderately Critical - CVE-2017-6923
REST API can bypass comment approval - Access Bypass - Moderately Critical - CVE-2017-6924

It is recommended that you update your Drupal application to the Drupal 8.3.7. You can follow our documentation to learn how to upgrade your application and ensure its security.

For new application deployments, including the Bitnami Launchpad, we have released Drupal 8.3.7 containers, installers, virtual machines and cloud images that includes the security fixes to address these vulnerabilities. If you deploy Bitnami Drupal via one of our cloud partner marketplaces and it is not yet updated to version 8.3.7, you will need to upgrade your application using our documentation.

If you have further questions about Bitnami Drupal or this security issue, please post to our community forum, and we will be happy to help you.