What is Bitnami?

If you want to work in Open Source, this is where you should look into.

This is a very useful site to keep in touch. It is a great resource if you want to work with Open Source stuff. Millions of developers use this site and you should too. This is great if you are trying to teach to yourself or doing some computer stuff for the non-profits. The pre-packaged apps and development environments are free to use and share.

These are some of the things you can do:

• Running apps in production

• Complete software development environment for your team

• Develop locally, deploy in the cloud

• Quickly test new apps

• Running your business

• Maintain parallel environments

• Research and learn new technologies

• Launch apps without extensive expertise

It does cover all OSs, Virtualization Platforms; and Cloud Platforms. It covers the whole universe of computer software.

The number of applications that you can get on to is really impressive. Here is a screen shot of the more popular applications.

  

Microsoft Web Platform Installer (WPI) is another similar program geared towards all the different Microsoft Technologies although WPI also offers many Open Source programs .

Here and here you have two detailed posts to get on to Microsoft Web Platform Installer.

What are the different Web Apps you can build in Microsoft Azure?

Between Web Apps and Native apps, the browser based Web Apps have a lot of advantages while in some cases Native Apps are more advantageous.

In the beginning there were ASP.NET Web sites and Cloud Services made their appearance later on Windows Azure, and now there are lots of Web Apps.

Under Web Apps you can build the following kind of apps. Some of the web apps can be built in the Windows Azure Portal and those in preview can only be accssesed in the preview portal:

• App Service Environment
• Application Insights
• Template deployment-classic
• Web App
• Web App+MySQL
• Web App+SQL
• ......

While the above are all from Microsoft, there are others from third party such as:

• DNN Platform from DNN Corporation
• Scalable Wordpress from WordPress
• Engine Yard Platform as Service
• SendGrid Email Delivery from SendGrid
• Umbraco CMS from Umbraco.org
• Notification Hub -not ready even for preview
• Joomla! from Joomla
• .....

There are many more and you login to the preview portal here to obtain the details (Search for Web+mobile).