Deployment
I look forward every month to the publication date of LXF. While I’m reasonably experienced in IT generally, I never cease to be impressed with the range and quality of open source software available on the platform.
I neither have the patience nor stamina to get really involved in the nitty gritty of Linux, I can stumble round the file structure and follow ‘how to’ tutorials, but if I make a ‘wrong turning’ I usually end up starting from scratch rather than fixing my mistakes.
Most of my interest has been directed towards web-type content management systems on different platforms. So far I’ve come across several means of installing software:
Traditional TAR archives The equivalent to ZIP, which are usually unbundled manually and may or may not provide scripts to install and configure the binaries.
GitHub Essentially, a library that contains source code and archives.
Native packages That are held in release repositories (repos) and deployed typically with sudo app-get install <package> followed by manual editing and configuring parameter files.
I’ve seen your explanations of Docker but that simply does my head in. For something which is supposed to make things easy it seems awfully complicated.
Finally, and it isn’t something you seem to have covered in any detail at all is Bitnami. Is there a reason for this? Is it be regarded as the ‘spawn of Beelzebub’ or is it such a niche product that it hasn’t warranted your attention to date?
My very limited experience with Bitnami is that it seems to offer many advantages over ‘roll your own’ implementations, but I get the feeling I might be missing something important. Is there any chance you could consider a feature comparing each of these methods, explaining benefits and risks of each, specifically with regard to common applications such as Wordpress? GraemeDobie,Edinburgh. Neil says: Without doubt open source has become an invaluable development approach, but as the Free Software Foundation points out: it’s the licence open source software uses that really counts towards software freedom, which of course should be the GPL v3.
That aside I totally agree that our early coverage of Docker by our Mr. Brown was pretty mind bending. Largely as it’s a system going through rapid development but is at the heart of a virtual revolution. Part of which points to your Bitnami service. This is just one of many new companies offering one-click virtually deployed server apps.
It’s why Docker is so important, it enables companies to bundle entire server deployments in a low-profile, easily launched package. Want a fresh Wordpress server? Click the button. Want a fresh OwnCloud instance? Press the button. We’re planning to look at more cloud virtualisation services soon: what they do, what you can use them for and how to choose a decent one. Hopefully this will go some way to answers your questions! LXF