Juju bundles and Quickstart: create a cloud environment in seconds

by Canonical on 17 March 2014

A few years ago, the cloud team at Canonical decided that the future of cloud computing lies not only in what clouds are built on, but what runs on it, and how quickly, securely, and efficiently those services can be managed. This is when Juju was born; our service modelling tool built for the cloud and inspired by the way IT architects visualise their infrastructure: boxes representing services, connected by lines representing interfaces or relationships. Juju’s GUI simplifies searching, dragging and dropping a ‘Charm’ into a canvas to deploy services instantly.

Today, we are announcing two new features for DevOps seeking ever faster and easier ways of deploying scalable infrastructure. The first are Juju Charm bundles that allow you to deploy an entire cloud environment with one click. Secondly we are announcing Quickstart which spins up an entire Juju environment and deploys the necessary services to run Juju, all with one command. Juju Bundles and Quickstart are powerful tools on their own but offer enormous value comes when they are used together: Quickstart can be combined with bundles to rapidly launch Juju, start-up the environment, and deploy an entire application infrastructure, all in one action.

Already there are several bundles available that cover key technology areas: security, big data, SaaS, back office workloads, web servers, content management and the integration of legacy systems.

Bundles for complex services

• Instant Hadoop: The Hadoop cluster bundle is a 7-node starter cluster designed to deploy Hadoop in a way that’s easily scalable. The deployment has been tested with up to 2,000 nodes on AWS.

• Instant Mongo: Mongodb, a 13-node (over three shards) starter MongoDB cluster and has the capability to horizontally scale all of the three shards.

• Instant Wiki: Two Mediawiki deployments; a simple example mediawiki deployment with just mediawiki and MySQL; and a load balanced deployment with HAProxy and memcached, designed to be horizontally scalable.

• A new bundle from import.io allows their SaaS platform to be instantly integrated inside Juju. Navigate to any website using the import.io browser, template the data and then test your crawl. Finally, use the import.io charm to crawl your data directly into ElasticSearch.

• Instant Security: Syncope + PostgreSQL, developed by Tirasa, is a bundle providing Apache Syncope with the internal storage up and running on PostreSQL. Apache Syncope is an open source system for managing digital identities in enterprise environments.

• Instant Enterprise Solutions: Credativ, experts in Open Source consultancy, are showing with their OpenERP bundle how any enterprise can instantly deploy an enterprise resource planning solution.

• Instant High Performance Computing: HPCC (High Performance Computing Cluster) is a massive parallel-processing computing platform that solves Big Data problems. The platform is Open Source and can now be instantly deployed via Juju.

Francesco Chicchiriccò, CEO Tirasa / VP Apache Syncope comments; “The immediate availability of an Apache Syncope Juju bundle dramatically shortens the product evaluation process and encourages adoption. With this additional facility to get started with Open Source Identity Management, we hope to increase the deployments of Apache Syncope in any environment.”

Bundles for developers

These bundles provide ‘hello world’ blank applications; they are designed as templates for application developers. Simply, they provide templates with configuration options to an application:

• Instant Django: A Django bundle with gunicorn and PostgreSQL modelled after the Django ‘Getting Started’ guide is provided for application developers.

• Instant Rails: Two Rails bundles, one is a simple Rails/Postgres deployment, the ‘scalable’ bundle adds HAProxy, Memcached, Redis, Nagios (for monitoring), and a Logstash/Kibana (for logging), providing an application developer with an entire scalable Rails stack.

• Instant Wildfly (The Community JBoss): The new Wildfly bundle from Technology Blueprint, provides an out-of-the-box Wildfly application server in a standalone mode running on openjdk 7. Currently MySQL as a datasource is also supported via a MySQL relation.

Technology Blueprint, creators of the Wildfly bundle, also uses Juju to build its own cloud environments. The company’s system administrator, Saurabh Jha comments; “Juju bundles are really beneficial for programmers and system administrators. Juju saves time, efforts as well as cost. We’ve used it to create our environment on the fly. All we need is a quick command and the whole setup gets ready automatically. No more waiting for installing and starting those heavy applications/servers manually; a bundle takes care of that for us. We can code, deploy and host our application and when we don’t need it, we can just destroy the environment. It’s that easy.”

You can browse and discover all new bundles on jujucharms.com.

Our entire ecosystem is hard at work too, charming up their applications and creating bundles around them. Upcoming bundles to look forward to include a GNU Cobol bundle, which will enable instant legacy integration, a telecom bundle to instantly deploy and integrate Project Clearwater – an open source IMS, and many others. For sure you have some ideas about a bundle that gives an instant solution to some common problems. It has never been easier to see your ideas turn into reality.

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If you would like to create your own charm or bundle, here is how to get started or watch a video about Charm Bundles.

And if you’ve never used Juju before, here is an excellent series of blog posts that will guide you through spinning up a simple environment on AWS.

Need help or advice? The Juju community is here to assist.

Finally, for the more technically-minded, here is a slightly more geeky take on things by Canonical’s Rick Harding, including a video walkthrough of Quickstart.