eWEEK - April 18 2011

Turnkey Linux

service, directly from the Turnkey Linux Hub Web interface.

uses Ubuntu
as a foundation

In my tests, the platform' s backup and restore utility did a great job easing the migration of a particular appliance instance from one to another of these deployment formats.

REVIEW: Turnkey Linux Hub 1.0 provides cloud
hosting and backup capabilities for the Web
application software appliances offered by the
Turnkey Linux project.

By Jason Brooks

Turnkey Linux Hub 1.0 is a Web-based service that sits atop Amazon' s Web Services to provide cloud hosting and backup capabilities for the line of Web application software appliances offered by the Turnkey Linux open-source project.

The Ubuntu customization that stands out the most in Turnkey Linux is the platform' s backup and restore utility, which creates encrypted backups of files, databases and lists of installed packages, either to Amazon S3 or to another local or networked location.

Turnkey Linux is an excellent option for individuals or organizations looking to test drive and deploy open-source Web applications covered by the project. It would serve well as a platform for building Web applications atop popular open-source stacks: There are appliances available for generic LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl), Ruby on Rails and Django stacks, among others.

The software-appliance-plus-cloud-services combination is similar to the Bitnami Cloud Hosting product that I recently reviewed, except that where Bitnami' s software stacks are packaged for use on multiple operating systems, Turnkey Linux is focused squarely on Ubuntu Linux as a foundation.

Turnkey Linux appliances are available in a handful of different deployment formats, including ISO images for bare-metal installation and OVF (Open Virtualization Format) packages for deployment on virtualization hosts (such as VMware vSphere or Citrix XenCenter) that support this format. Turnkey Linux appliances are also available for deployment to Amazon' s EC2

The project' s mix of administration tools provides comfortable options for newcomers and old hands at Linux administration alike, and the platform' s wide deployment and backup options make it easy to focus on the application at the top of the stack.

All Turnkey Linux appliances are
freely downloadable, and pricing
for S3 storage and EC2 hosting is
based strictly on use, at the same
rates that Amazon Web Services
charges directly. The Turnkey devel-
opers have considered charging a 10
percent premium atop the EC2 rates
Turnkey Linux appliances,
which cover a broad range of
popular open-source, Web-
based applications, are built
atop the current Long Term
Support version of Ubuntu
and abide by Ubuntu' s sys-
tem administration conven-
tions. The appliances ship with
phpMyAdmin, Webmin and
Shell in a Box to provide data-
base, system and command line
tools through a Web interface.

to help fund the project, but as yet, they have not put any such premium into place.

Testing Turnkey Linux

It was easy to launch Turnkey

I tested Turnkey Linux with Mediawiki and Wordpress appliances, which I deployed on Oracle' s VirtualBox 4.0 running on my notebook, on the VMware vSphere infrastructure in our lab and on Amazon' s EC2 cloud hosting service.