BitNami Cloud Hosting, developed by BitRock, is now available. According to its website, "BitNami makes hosting applications in the cloud a simple and enjoyable process." Linux Pro Magazine wanted to know a little more about the BitNami Cloud Hosting and spoke with BitRock CEO, Erica Brescia, about the launch.

LPM: What excites you most about BitNami?

EB: I love the fact that BitNami is helping to drive adoption of open source and the cloud by making them accessible to users of all skill levels - not just 'hardcore techies' or systems administrators. BitNami Cloud Hosting makes it incredibly easy to deploy, backup, restore, start and stop and monitor applications running on the Amazon Cloud (with support for other clouds coming in the future.) The BitNami.org site provides free installers, virtual appliances and cloud templates for popular open source applications to tens of thousands of users per month in virtually every country on the planet. We have heard a lot of great stories about people using BitNami to set up web applications in schools, churches and medical clinics, to name a few. It is incredibly cool to know that we are helping people get access to technology that they might not otherwise be able to use.

LPM: What makes BitNami different from other Cloud hosting providers?

EB: BitNami Cloud Hosting is focused on the applications and provides a layer of automation on top of PaaS that makes it easy to deploy and manage them. We currently support Amazon EC2, but plan on adding support for other clouds in the future. Amazon takes care of the 'plumbing', or all of the infrastructure, and BitNami provides one-click application deployment, automatic incremental backups, server scheduling, server re-sizing, monitoring and other features that make it easy to actually launch a server with an application on it and make sure that it is running smoothly. We'll be adding other application-specific functionality as we build out the platform.

LPM: How can people get involved in the BitNami community?

EB: The best way to participate with BitNami is by participating in the forums. Because we provide all of the BitNami Stacks free of charge and have so many users, we're not able to give direct email support to users and ask that they post questions to our forums. Any help that we can get with supporting BitNami users would be very much appreciated!

BitNami has an FAQ page that answers questions about the cost of BitNami Cloud Hosting, the Amazon Free Tier, launching more than 50 servers, and more.

Also, BitNami has a special offer that ends tomorrow, February 11, 2011 - If you sign up for BitNami Cloud Hosting before February 11th and activate your account by entering your AWS credentials, you will be entitled to a free Basic plan subscription for 3 months (or an equivalent discount if you need a larger plan).

For more information, check out the BitNami.org and BitNami Cloud Hosting websites.