The Indico software operator is now available to optimise event management

by Michael C. Jaeger on 24 March 2023

Available freely on Charmhub.io

Communities naturally need to meet, come together, have conversations, or exchange news. Communities like to see the people behind the work, hear about experiences first hand and meet new contacts. As the world recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic,  we are seeing a rising number of in-person events coming back.

However, those who have organised events know it is a lot of work. And if the number of attendees grows beyond a dozen, it is challenging to manage registrations, speakers, the agenda, and web site content just with spreadsheets. Luckily, there are tools that make this easier. 

Indico – the open-source server for conference management

Is there an application which presents the event on a website? Does that website include all the details, where interested people can register, have their user space, and organisers can set up presentations with an agenda?

Indico is a proven open-source server solution covering all these needs. The United Nations organisation uses Indico for their events. The project was initiated and is maintained by CERN. 

Charmed Operator for Indico

For event organisers, the main challenge comes with the installation, configuration, and maintenance of Indico. The need to deploy and operate server applications involves extra work and effort. Solutions like Indico are not stand-alone apps which the user can start with a double-click on its icon.

Of course, some people with a background in event management can also install such web applications independently. But it requires much more: server solutions need a database, a web server frontend, and for professional operations, monitoring and alerting. At the same time, servers must be robust and secure. Otherwise, the service can get overloaded, behave erratically, get hacked, display misinformation or even spread malware. Also, many organisations need to run a platform for events involving hundreds of attendees with several days full of presentations, such as the Ubuntu Summit. – So they need to consider scaling as well.

Juju and the Charmed Operator Framework are our answers to deploying and operating server applications with ease professionally. Juju provides an abstraction for all deployment environments: private clouds, public clouds, virtual machines and Kubernetes containers.

Every application component running on Juju has a counterpart: a software operator. The operator codifies the instructions, settings and workflows to install and operate a particular application component. An application component can be a database, a web server, or a dashboard – all the ingredients for running Indico. Operators built using the Charmed Operator Framework are called Charmed Operators. We have made a Charmed Operator for Indico to reduce hosting efforts for our own Indico instance while improving operational reliability.

With Charmed Operators, we reduce the challenges for all users, individuals, communities and organisations interested in using Indico. With Juju, Indico can be easily deployed on private clouds as well as on a public cloud. Juju and Charmed Operators provide for all the elements of Indico, such as the Web server, storage, and databases, a uniform interface for operations and an abstraction from the deployment infrastructure – reducing efforts significantly. 

All open source

Of course, we love using open-source software for open-source events. All the Charmed Operators for Indico are available as open source as well as Juju and the Charmed Operator Framework. Thus, no organisation needs to sign a contract or pay licence fees to use Indico with Juju and its Charmed Operators. They are available on Charmhub.io. 

To learn more, watch our recorded presentation for Indico at Operator Day. To check out many other Charmed Operators, visit Charmhub.io. 

Read more

• Learn more about Indico
• Get Indico for Juju on Charmhub.io
• Learn more about Juju
• Learn more about the Charmed Operator Framework

Or, in case you would like to contact us – we would be happy to answer your questions:

Contact Canonical