Bitnami is probably best known for making it easy to deploy web apps, services and development environments with just a few clicks. As developers start moving to containers, Bitnami, too, has to change to keep up with this trend. The company today launched the first beta of Stacksmith at Docker’s developer conference in Barcelona.
Stacksmith gives developers a set of “high-quality, updated and curated application components” they can use for both development and production within Docker. Bitnami says this service builds on top of its existing set of curated runtimes and components and translates high-level app requirements into Docker files.
“By adding application code to this Docker file applications and all its dependencies are captured into an easy-to-share, customizable Docker file and container image that fits with existing build and deployment tools,” the company explains its new service. Bitnami notes that developers can, for example, pick the likes of Python, Java, PHP, Go, Ruby or Node, as well as their favorite frameworks for these languages to build their containerized development environments.
Building these customer container images should only take a few minutes and once they are available, developers can also easily share them with just a URL.
“By using the Stacksmith service application developers can free themselves from worrying about framework dependencies and lower level Linux requirements; they can focus on building great software using their language of choice,” said Simon Bennett, Bitnami’s Vice President of products in today’s announcement. “The goal of this beta is we want the community to build as many different kinds of images as possible and to use Stacksmith in a way we never anticipated. We love to be surprised.”
To ensure the security of these new containers, Bitnami will notify developers when there are security issues or other updates for the components in these custom containers.
In addition to Stacksmith — and based on it — Bitnami also today announced the release of a set of new container images for common language runtimes in Google’s Container Registry.
“We want to make development with containers easy and Bitnami’s new Stacksmith service is a great step in that direction,” said Kit Merker, Google’s product manager for its Google Container Registry. “Google Container Registry is a fast, secure and cost effective way to store your containers. The combination of both services lets you declare your dependencies to generate Docker files from re-usable base images.”
Google and Bitnami seem to have a pretty good relationship these days. The two companies previously worked together to bring Bitnami apps to the Google Cloud Platform, for example. There, too, the focus was on making it easy for developers to set up curated developer environments on Google’s servers.