juju for testing purposes

[Marc Tardif]

* Clint Byrum <clint at ubuntu.com> [2011-11-24 07:49 -0800]:
> Excerpts from Marc Tardif's message of Thu Nov 24 06:37:08 -0800 2011:
> > I have a project that would benefit from regular testing across Ubuntu
> > releases since Lucid but the project isn't really big enough to bother
> > with a Continuous Integration setup. Would juju be a good solution to
> > branch the code in the cloud, build the development environment, run
> > the tests and have the results returned to my local machine?
> 
> Because it is easier to deal with than ec2-run-instances or some of the
> other cloud wrappers, it might be. You'd basically have a charm with an
> install hook that ran all of your tests, and then did something with them
> to get them back to you. 

This sounds comparable to using a cloud-init script whereas I'm eager
to learn how juju could kick that up a notch.

> That bit about getting them back to your local machine may not fly
> though. Juju is designed to scale to many thousands of instances, so
> everything is asynchronous. So you're going to have to find a way to get
> it back to you.. if the results are small, email might be the simplest
> method. Also the install hook can't tell the machine to terminate. So
> you'd end up doing something like this
> 
> juju deploy my-tester
> < wait for tests to run and email to come in
> juju destroy-service my-tester

This is exactly my annoyance with cloud-init: I have to check when
each instance has finished in order to terminate them. Stepping back
a bit, perhaps the problem is that I'm attempting to use the cloud to
run commands rather than deploy services. In other words, might it be
possible that I'm considering the wrong tool for the wrong job?

-- 
Marc Tardif <marc.tardif at canonical.com>
Freenode: cr3, Jabber: cr3 at jabber.org
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