Juju – It’s About Building Relationships!

by Canonical on 3 August 2015

I admit it, I was excited about Juju before I even fully understood it. But isn’t that part of the magic of anything called Juju?

I’m new to Canonical, I’m less than a month into my tenure here. But I’m already super excited to have joined. What has me so excited? The company‘s vision, and the relationships I’ll build with fun, smart people while I’m here.

You see, Canonical isn’t focused on traditional enterprise computing, and it’s not entirely about the modern cloud, either. Canonical is looking toward the next phase of how we, technology people, interact to accomplish things. And sometimes, before the next way of doing things has become the norm, it can be really confusing. Many of us tend to think of new ideas as something we already know, even when they’re not.

Remember when virtualization was new? Just the concept was nearly impossible for people to wrap their heads around. You mean I now have 20 servers in one box, but I can’t see them? It’s not unreasonable for people to initially be confused and skeptical. The difficulty people initially had with understanding a disruptive technology like virtualization is the same they might have understanding a disruptive technology like Juju from Canonical.

So, why did I join Canonical? Because I knew they were doing something cool, and I wanted to be a part of it. More specifically, I wanted to tell the story of what that is. That gets us back to Juju. Juju is cool, it’s forward-looking, and it’s awesome. But it’s also largely misunderstood in the year of computing, 2015. People want to think it’s something they already know, and really, it’s not.

Juju is about relationships. It’s about building relationships between your applications. It’s about building relationships between the people you work with in technology, from developer to operator to IT architect. It’s about building the relationships between the software and the people, themselves. Basically, if there’s a relationship involved, Juju handles it.

What do we mean by relationships? Well, if you think about an application, it has dependencies, things like talking to a database, or a partner application, or a second copy of itself for high availability. Traditionally, you’ve installed the application and then manually created the relationship between it and the database it needs, or its partner application, etc.

But what if you could draw all of those relationships on something like a whiteboard, and then just click deploy? And voila! Your relationships aren’t just a picture any more, they’re reality. That’s Juju.

What about the people aspect of the relationships that Juju builds? Well, think about the traditional lifecycle of writing an application, or deploying a new, multi-tiered application solution. Typically, an IT architect might design the solution at a high level, working with development, operations, network and storage administrators. After the design has been completed, the team goes about making it happen. That could involve multiple iterations of the solution design, each time, passing the workload back and forth, and in many cases, starting some, or all, of the project over, installing, reinstalling, reconfiguring any number of pieces of software.

Imagine if you could simply pass the whiteboard around the room. Sketch out what you need, let your colleague add their part, update the dependencies you’ve diagrammed, and pass it on. Then, you could just click to deploy the entire whiteboard. Test, analyze, identify issues, pass the whiteboard back, update the solution, and deploy the whiteboard again. And, again, voila! Your solution is now designed, tested, and deployed, ready for production. That’s the power of Juju.

Juju isn’t just about developers, administrators and operators. It isn’t just about application deployment, configuration and management. Juju is about all those things, and, most importantly, the relationships between them. It’s about every person and every application involved in designing, developing, and deploying complex applications in your private or public cloud.

Juju reduces the friction of relationships. It reduces the complexity in building relationships. It reduces the time it takes for relationships to deliver something awesome.

Juju is all about relationships. Start building yours today at jujucharms.com