Tuesday, August 23, 2011

New Features in BitNami Cloud Hosting - Improved UI, Enhanced Monitoring and More

We are excited to announce several new features in BitNami Cloud Hosting! Today we released an improved, simplified user interface for creating and configuring your servers. The monitoring section now includes timestamps on the timeline and support for PostgreSQL. You can attach notes to servers that include additional information or reminders . See below for more details on this latest batch of improvements to BitNami Cloud Hosting.

New Server Creation Interface

Server Creation Interface for BitNami Cloud Hosting

We have updated our user interface, structuring configuration options around application, server and cloud layers. This provides a quick overview of the settings previous to a server launch and provides a foundation on which we will be building future functionality.

In particular, we want to make it easier to use BitNami cloud servers for test and development. As a first step, we are providing you with greater visibility into the software stack installed in the server. Clicking on 'Development options' allows to view the stack components and control of which extra services can be started, including popular addons such as  PostgreSQL, Tomcat and Memcached. As we merge functionality from our BitNami Studio product, you will be able to add/remove components, choose between multiple versions of a product and add your own, giving you the ability to create a fully customized stack.

Configuring the development stack

Enhanced Monitoring

The monitoring reports in BitNami Cloud Hosting now include timestamps, so you can see exactly what time a particular event occurred. To view the timestamps, simply hover over the part of a monitoring chart for which you would like to see a timestamp, as shown in the image below. 

Monitoring timeline

We have also added support for PostgreSQL. If you have added PostgreSQL to your server, or are using an application that requires it (such as OSQA) you will see the status in the ‘Services’ section of the Monitoring tab.

Server Notes

You can now add notes to your servers to help you keep track of information about them. Once a note has been added to a server, a small sticky note icon will be displayed next to the server name on the Servers screen.  Hovering over the icon in the Server section will show the information.

To add a note to one of your servers, go to the Servers screen, check the box next to the server, click on the ‘Manage Server’ button and then the ‘Notes’ tab. You will see a button to ‘Add a note’, as shown below.


Adding notes to servers

We hope you enjoy these new features in BitNami Cloud Hosting. If you don't yet have an account, sign up today for a free trial. With our new OpenID support, you can create an account with your existing Facebook, Yahoo!, GitHub, or Google account, so you can be up and running with your favorite open source applications in the cloud in minutes!