Charm Partner Newsletter: July

by Ellen Arnold on 14 July 2016

In this issue…

Ecosystem growth: Welcome to our new partners
New features and tips: Juju GUI 2.0, using ZFS and LXD, and OPNFV charming
Upcoming events: Juju Charmer Summit 12-14 September and upcoming office hours

Ecosystem Growth

Canonical announced multiple signatories to its Juju Charm Partner Program (CPP) in June. We’ve added leading storage and networking solutions to the catalogue of public Juju charms. New additions include Nuage Networks from Nokia, CloudBase Solutions, Midokura and Quobyte.

New features, tips, & tricks

Juju GUI 2.0

Over the last year we’ve been working on a redesign of the Juju GUI. This redesign project focused on improving four key areas:

Improve the functionality of the core features of the GUI
Reduce cognitive load and pace the user
Provide an at-a-glance understanding of model health
Surface functions and facilitate task-driven navigation

To learn more about the new design, read the full blog here.

Using Juju on your laptop with ZFS and LXD

One of the best things about using Juju locally on your laptop is the speed at which you can iterate locally and then push out to a real cloud. In the upcoming Juju 2.0 we’ve enabled Juju to use LXD, linux containers, and the ZFS filesystem for an even faster performing local-development set up that is our fastest experience ever.

LXD: a hypervisor for LXC, providing fast, secure containers
ZFS: a combined filesystem/LVM which gives great performance

LXD is set up out of the box to do things like cache your most common images, making a 2nd deployment of something much faster than the first. And ZFS’s copy-on-write ability means that when you horizontally scale a deployment on your local machine that it’s much faster than on a traditional filesystem.

Run the following commands to install the required software:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install juju zfsutils-linux

In order to use LXD, your user must be in the ‘lxd’ group. All system users are automatically added to this group, but you may need to refresh the current session. You can confirm your user is part of this group by running the command:

newgrp lxd

LXD includes an interactive initialisation which will also set up a ZFS pool to use and configures networking for your containers. To start this process, enter:

sudo lxd init

You will be prompted for various options. As an example, to configure LXD to create a new 32GB ZFS pool to use, called ‘lxd-pool’, and set up a bridge network (required for Juju), your session would look like this:

Name of the storage backend to use (dir or zfs): zfs
     Create a new ZFS pool (yes/no)? yes
     Name of the new ZFS pool: lxd-pool
     Would you like to use an existing block device (yes/no)? no
     Size in GB of the new loop device (1GB minimum): 32
     Would you like LXD to be available over the network (yes/no)? no
     Do you want to configure the LXD bridge (yes/no)? yes

The last question will initiate a series of dialogues to configure the bridge device and subnet. Except in the case the subnet may clash with existing networks, it is okay to accept the defaults on all dialogues (though it is not required to configure IPv6 networking).

And that’s it, you can bootstrap a lxd controller with `juju bootstrap name_you_choose lxd` and then use Juju normally.

You can also check out this older video showing off the ZFS/LXD/Juju combination:

OPNFV Juju Charm Training

This OPNFV Juju charm training is focused on OpenStack and VNFs charm development, and was filmed during OpenStack Summit in Austin.

Upcoming events

Juju Charmer Summit

When? 12-14 September 2016

Where? Pasadena, California

We’re proud to announce that we’re ready to have our third conference around Juju, the Juju Charmers Summit, taking place September 12-14 in Pasadena, California, USA. All our charming experts are gathering in one place to help spread charming knowledge and technical networking. Attendees will have access to experts in charming OpenStack, NFV, Big Data, Containers (Swarm, Kubernetes, and Mesos), and Benchmarking. Attendance is free for anyone who wants to participate.

For more information please visit http://summit.juju.solutions/

Juju Office Hours

When? July 15th, 2016

Where? http://ubuntuonair.com for the stream

Time: 9PM UTC, 4PM EST, 1PM PST

Participate: #juju on freenode

Juju Office Hours is a freeflow meeting where we discuss what’s happening in and around the ecosystem, what hot new changes are landing in charms and Juju itself, and our favorite part, you can join in and ask the team questions about anything Juju related.

We will cover as many topics as we can in an hour, and take questions from the crowd. If you want to participate in the hangout itself ping me ahead of time and we’d love to have you onboard.

Contact us! For more information on the Charm Partner Programme, please visit partners.ubuntu.com/programmes/charm