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Create your own turnkey solutions

Appliance Apps

Article from ADMIN 00/2010

By Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier

Software appliances provide a convenient means for packaging, transporting, and deploying software without the need for complex, repetitive configuration steps.

Open source tools make it possible to create powerful software solutions and distribute them effectively. Unfortunately, many open source solutions consist of complex software stacks that are hard to configure and manage. With a software appliance , you can roll up the entire stack, from the kernel and system libraries, all the way to pre-configured databases and userland software, into a turnkey system.

Like a toaster or coffee maker, a software appliance does one thing, and does it well. Also like a toaster, a software appliance serves its role right out of the box, in a simple and convenient way that does not demand extensive knowledge of the internal design.

For some appliances, you will have to provide a complete stack – all the way from the kernel to the userland applications. Other times, you need provide only the operating system, and the rest is supplied by a pre-configured installer. In all cases, however, software appliances greatly simplify installing and configuring an application or platform.

Finding Stacks and Pre-Made Appliances

If you're looking for software appliances for standard open source tools like a Ruby on Rails stack or applications like the Drupal content management system (CMS), the odds are you'll find one. Many Linux Live CD distributions serve as software appliances in some sense. If you're looking for a Live CD distribution, I recommend checking DistroWatch [1].

One of the oldest and best-known LAMP distributions is XAMPP [2]. XAMPP provides your basic LAMP stack (Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl). It runs on most Linux distributions and is an easy way to get a working LAMP stack without figuring out which packages you might need to install or keep updated. Although I don't recommend using this for production, it is a good way to get a

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