Hello Ubuntu Developers! At UDS I received some hallway feedback that some of you would like an occasional status report of what's going on in Juju land, a more high level review to give people an idea on how things are coming along and how that relates to Ubuntu. So before people head into the holiday season here's a quick summary of what's going on.
# The basics: For those of you not following, Juju is a service orchestration tool for the cloud. A simple use case would be is if you want a mysql server, instead of manually installing Ubuntu in a cloud, sshing in, and installing MySQL you do a "juju deploy mysql" and Juju fires off an instance for you in the cloud, and then installs and configures mysql. You can then relate it to other services in the cloud and build a deployment, add units, and generally manage the service at that level instead of dealing with machine-level management. The scripts that do the deployment and management are called "charms", which we curate and keep in the Juju Charm Store, which people can then deploy right from the command line or web UI into their cloud. The current version is .6, which you can find in the Juju PPA. There are currently 110 charms in the charm store, with submissions and fixes from 108 contributors. # Status of the Go port: David Cheney announced juju-core 1.9.3 a few days ago, here's the highlights: - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/juju-dev/2012-December/000333.html # Status of the Juju Charm Store While 110 charms is great, people who deploy Ubuntu in the cloud demand quality, and charm testing has been a part of the charm store since the beginning. You can find the status of our charm testing in Jenkins: https://jenkins.qa.ubuntu.com/view/Charms/view/Charms-Precise/view/ec2/ One thing we're working on is having this information more conveniently available on a charm's individual page at jujucharms.com so that its test results are more prominent as you browse the charm collection. Along with this we're planning on adding a charm quality rating to each charm to make it more obvious to people what features a charm offers: https://juju.ubuntu.com/docs/charm-quality.html Additionally, at a UDS session there were some concerns as to how visible a charm's relationship was to its security support. So for instance, if you `juju deploy` something that is in main that you're getting that package that is supported by the security team, and not some other version. Though some charms have options to pull from an upstream source we plan on making it obvious when a charm has that option, and of course, defaulting to the supported packaged version when appropriate and making it clear to the user what options a charm has. ## Platform Charms Certain charms have the ability to pull a developer's code from version control and deploy it in the cloud on their "application stack". I call these platform charms and they generally map out to common development stacks people use. So for example rails, django, and node.js. The nice thing about these charms for web developers is that it allows them to work on their application and deploy locally with Juju and LXC in an environment that mimics what they would see when deploying in a real cloud; so you'd iterate locally quickly, and then push to your cloud when you're ready for test/production. While we have been dogfooding the django work with Summit; rails and node.js are complete enough where they are in the store, yet they're basic and could use some feature work to make them more useful to that set if developers, so if you're familiar with those stacks or know someone that is, I'd love to work with you. We could also use a hand with shaping up our PHP charm story (which unfortunately right now is almost non-existant), and while we have a Tomcat6 charm, we're very thin services that would be useful to Java shops, so please feel free to ping me if you're a Java and/or PHP shop and you'd like to help shape our Juju story for those platforms. ## Documentation Our documentation has merely been adequate to this point, it can still be difficult for people to get up and running with Juju. This is an area I plan on improving this cycle. We've recently redone the website to make it easier to use: https://juju.ubuntu.com/ However the documentation is still standalone and not integrated, and it's not organized well to begin with. There have been some community discussions about how to reorganize the documentation to make it easier to understand and to make it more usable; work is ongoing here. Any help in this area would be much appreciated! ## The "unprovider" Juju's main use case is cloud deployments, this usually means dozens, hundreds, and thousands of instances; but I can appreciate someone who wants to use the goodness who doesn't have an OpenStack cloud in their garage. There has been some interest in a simple Juju provider that can ssh to your cheap VPS or server and deploy charms. We nickname this the "unprovider" and we're looking for people who are interested in making Juju scale down. For more information see Jono's blog post: http://www.jonobacon.org/2012/11/10/vpss-ubuntu-and-juju/ If you're interested in working on this please ping me offlist. # How to help and where to find us. The easiest way to get involved is to write charms for things you're interested in using on Ubuntu in the cloud. Even if you find something that you use in the list of charms: http://jujucharms.com/charms/precise each charm is really never finished, there's always new features, new relationships to other services, and general best practice that can be applied to charms. I am especially interested if you're an expert in a certain package and want to look at it's corresponding charm and give us feedback. Feel free to just ask us where you'd like to get started! We're in #juju on Freenode, #juju-dev if you're interested in core Juju. And here's the mailing list: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/juju Thanks and happy Ubuntu-ing! -- Jorge Castro Canonical Ltd. http://juju.ubuntu.com -- ubuntu-devel mailing list ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel