There is a whole category that is related to this that I believe would be great for OSTicket developers to familiarize themselves with. The term is DevOps. Basically, it is a new design paradigm leveraging virtual environments. A virtual environment is different from a virtual server. It basically means that each application has it's own environment. So all application libraries/dependencies exist in that virtual environment and are separate from the environment used by the other applications on the same server.This is great because rather than giving a guide to users on how to install and configure the dependencies in order to get the product working, the developers of the products just build the "container" or virtual environment. The user then just has to make sure they have the container service installed (Docker in this case) and they just run the docker file that you provide.DevOps is moving toward making administration declarative and procedural, rather than a manual process. Developers can define the environment the application will live in rather than hope that the system admins for the customer set it up right. This makes developers more confident that the environment they are developing for will be the actual environment it will be running in.If OSTicket moves into this container model, I think you'll actually be able to sell your hosting through the Amazon Web Services marketplace. AWS customers would be able to do a one click deployment and within a few minutes, have a working system and the upgrades would be just as easy.I think this concept could also be explored for packaging multiple OSTicket instances together in a way that works very well. One feature that would be nice to see is the ability to make content and configuration changes in a test environment and then when you are satisfied that it is working well, you push a button to deploy that to your production system. Right now my organization is doing this process manually but having actual support for it would be great.

@[deleted]Oh, I'm aware that there are paid hosting solutions and I'm not suggesting Docker only as a means of serving those interested in that solution. I am suggesting Docker as a container service for all users, even those that host on their own site. It has many benefits but it also makes hosting solutions easier and available on AWS as AWS uses containers.

Seriously. Start using Docker. I just updated gitlab via docker. Here's all you do.docker pull gitlab-ce<it downloads the newest image>docker stop gitlabdocker rm gitlabdocker run gitlab-ce <port mapping and volume mapping including config file>DONE!By doing this I have exactly the same web server, php version, java version, apache, file permissions, EVERYTHING the same as the developers. All the config is stored in the config file on the host server that holds the containers. That means I only have to backup a TINY config file to backup my instance because everything else is reproducible form the image.This is a support dream on both ends. OST devs know that users have EXACTLY the same environment and customers know they are running it the EXACT some way it was meant to be run.All OST devs would have to do is push the changes to the docker repository (much like a git repo). Customers don't even need to know the latest version numbers. They can just pull with the :"latest" tag.Once pushed, people install by pulling then running. That's it! There would be a config file (XML or YAML or whatever). There you could have smpt settings, LDAP settings, etc. If people used the config file then the run of the image would also do all the config mapping to preserve configurations between images. Because of this, images can just be thrown away. All that matters is in the config file...

Oh, this also means that if a client sets the config file flag on LDAP to true and inputs the LDAP settings, they wouldn't need to go out and download the LDAP plugin and figure it out. The image would see the flag and do it for the client. Same for anything else...