Q&A with New Node.js Foundation Member Bitnami about Kubernetes, Cloud-Native and More.
Bitnami is one of the newest Silver Members to the Node.js Foundation — you can read about all of the new members here. The company packages applications for any platform, making it possible for organizations to quickly deploy software on the patform of their choice, from native installers to cloud images to containers.
We recently sat down with them for a Q&A on how their users are working with Node.js, growth that they’ve seen in the cloud-native space in the last few years, and why they joined the Founation. Read the Q&A below.
What is Bitnami and how are Node.js developers using this technology?
Bitnami is best known for application packaging. Through the Bitnami application catalog, we deliver and maintain 140+ ready-to-run server applications and development environments (mostly open source) to simplify software installation with an emphasis on accelerating cloud adoption for the world’s leading cloud providers.
Node.js is one of the more popular developer tools that we package. With the Bitnami Node.js stack, compiling, configuring and all of its dependencies are taken care of, so it works out-of-the-box, providing a one-click install solution.
Visitors to Bitnami.com can download local installers or vms or launch their own Node.js server directly into any of our cloud provider partners’ clouds using virtual machines or container images. We populate cloud marketplaces for AWS, Amazon Lightsail, Microsoft Azure, Google, Oracle and others with a ready-to-run Node.js stack that includes the latest version of Node.js, Apache, Python and Redis. Additionally, we package Node.js as a component of the Bitnami MEAN stack to provide a complete development environment.
What cloud platforms do you work with; what are the most popular platforms for you and why?
Bitnami customers include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, VMware, 1&1, Centurylink, Deutsch Telekom’s Open Telekom Cloud, Huawei and more.
How has Bitnami grown in the last few years?
Bitnami has seen tremendous growth as we’ve progressed from packaging local installers and VMs to multi-tier VMs and embraced cloud platforms, container images and most recently Kubernetes templates. Most of the major cloud vendors feature Bitnami packages in their cloud marketplaces and we’re currently seeing over 1 million deployments of Bitnami packaged applications every month.
What trends are you seeing in the space?
As more enterprises focus on software development and cloud migration as part of a larger digitization strategy, we’re seeing increased interest in Docker images and Kubernetes templates, especially for our packaged development tools and runtimes. In a recent user survey, we saw the number of Bitnami users adopting containers grow by more than 2x over the previous year. The survey also showed that container usage is growing rapidly with production usage growing more than 150% year over year. 65% of respondents reported running containers in production, with the fastest growing segment of that group now running 50 or more container host machines.
Why was it important for you to join the Node.js Foundation?
As users of Node.js, and a company that packages and distributes Node.js, we felt it was important to support the Foundation. As more developers embrace new development tools like Node.js, we want to be a primary enabler of that transition, providing users with pre-configured Node.js environments that can simplify their first experience using it on a local machine or providing secure, optimized packages or stacks for multi-cloud usage.
As we continue to build our portfolio of open source developer tools for containers, Kubernetes and whatever is next, we’d like to engage the community in a discussion around those platforms, their needs and how Node.js can be best used to create cloud-native infrastructure and core developer tools.
Are you working on any big projects that you are excited about, and want to share with the Node.js community?
We’ve got a lot of exciting projects and partnerships underway but two that I am excited about and I think the Node.js community will relate to are 1.) All of the Kubernetes work that we’ve been doing and 2.) our soon to be released automated application packaging and deployment platform for enterprise developers.
On the Kubernetes front we have been very busy with Bitnami-led open source projects such as the Kubeless native serverless framework, the Kubernetes application deployment management tool Kubecfg, our Kubeapps.com Kubernetes-ready application catalog, Cabin for mobile kubernetes management and core contributions to Kubernetes projects such as Helm, Monocular and Ksonnet, Kompose and more.
We even have a chart for a Node deployment on a Kubernetes cluster using the Helm package manager. We made an early commitment to Kubernetes as the platform of the future and we continue to make investments in helping our customers by delivering kubernetes-ready tools and templates.
For our upcoming enterprise offering we’re productizing much of the tooling we’ve built over the years to manage the Bitnami cloud catalog at scale. The automation platform that powers our application catalog offering today, managing thousands of package builds and updates, will soon be available to enterprise developers. So businesses that are looking to accelerate development and deployment of internal software projects or to migrate their existing applications into the cloud will have a powerful new tool to enable that transition.
