Here’s an interesting post from ActiveState’s Jan Dubois on running Bugzilla on their StackatoPaaS. It’s not a quite as simple as running on your own server, but Dubois does a good job of explaining the steps.
The process Dubois outlines includes:
- Patching Bugzilla due to a conflict with a Perl module in Stackato’s version of Perl.
- Implementing a fix to use Bugzilla with PSGI.
- Figuring out all the modules that Bugzilla needs.
- Writing a script to download, deploy and patch Bugzilla, because it’s not available via CPAN.
- Fixing a bug in the CGI::Emulate::PSGI module.
Short and simple, right? At least Dubois put everything up on GitHub that you’d need to run Bugzilla on Stackato if you like.
Packaging for PaaS
One of the reasons I find Dubois’ post interesting is how much more complicated it is right now to deploy a fairly standard FOSS application on a PaaS. If you want to run an entire image (operating system and all) it’s easy to deploy a lot of stock applications on IaaS providers like AWS right now. But if you want to just deploy on top of a PaaS, there’s a lot of lifting to do.
I think in 2012 we’ll see smart PaaS providers working with popular FOSS projects to make sure that their software just runs.
