Charm update for March

[Jorge O. Castro]

Hi everyone, here's what's been going on:
I've also posted this here if you prefer html:
http://www.jorgecastro.org/2013/03/13/juju-charm-updates-for-march/

----

We've had a [breakneck pace](http://jujucharms.com/recently-changed)
of Juju progress over the past few months, I'm going to attempt to
summarize all the fabulous work the Ubuntu community has been working
on to make deploying applications in the cloud a rockin' experience.

The Node.js, Django, and Rails charms are what we call "platform
charms". The idea here is to whip up a quick config telling juju where
your application lives (github, etc.), then you just pass that along
to juju and it'll deploy your app in the cloud. Check [this
out](http://www.jorgecastro.org/2012/11/16/deploying-your-rails-application-in-the-cloud-via-juju/)
for an example. Ideally with these charms we can make _any_
applications written in these stacks to be instantly deployable with
little to no work by the user.

### Node.js

- Marius B. Kotsbak has been working on our Node.js charm. His first
is to add [support for
updating](https://code.launchpad.net/~mariusko/charms/precise/node-app/trunk)
the user application.
- Marius has a [blueprint](https://blueprints.launchpad.net/juju/+spec/juju-charm-app-git-deployment)
with how he expects the node charm's behavior will be fleshed out.
- Feel free to ping Marius or myself if you're a node.js developer and
interested in helping out.

### Django

- Patrick Hetu and Bruno Girin have been on a roll lately, check out
[this post](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/django-users/979lJojyxs0/KK9fWfkK0FYJ)
to the django-user's mailing list asking for feedback on their Django
work.

### Rails

Lots of activity in Rails this week, thanks to Pavel Pachkovskij from
[Altoros Inc.](http://altoros.com/)

- A [Rack charm](http://jujucharms.com/charms/precise/rack) that let's
you deploy a rack application.
- And you have your choice of which webserver you want to deploy with
it, either [apache2-passanger](http://jujucharms.com/charms/precise/apache2-passenger),
or [nginx-passenger](http://jujucharms.com/charms/precise/nginx-passenger).
- And lastly (not in the store yet), there's an addition of the [God
monitoring framework](http://jujucharms.com/~pavel-pachkovskij/precise/god),
which you can use as a subordinate charm to monitor your deployed
stack.

Not a bad set of updates for Rails, we're hoping that by 14.04 we'll
have a fully instrumented Rack stack that will be tested and scalable
for everyone.

### Databases

 - Stuart Bishop has added master/slave replication to the Postgres
charm. You can find out how to use it in [the
README](http://jujucharms.com/charms/precise/postgresql).
 - Antonio Rosales demoed setting up replicasets with the [MongoDB
charm](http://jujucharms.com/charms/precise/mongodb) at MongoDB
Austin.

### Other updates

 And those are just the highlights, a ton of work continues to go into
one of our most important set of charms, OpenStack, too many to list
here, we'll just show you at ODS, heh.

 - What will become Juju 2.0 has now released version
[1.9.11](https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/juju/2013-March/002156.html)
for your testing pleasure, this is the first time the 2.0 series can
run on HP Cloud, so we could use some testing there.

 Come check us out at [any one of these events in
2013](http://juju.ubuntu.com/Events) if you're interested in learning
more.

--
Jorge Castro
Canonical Ltd.
http://juju.ubuntu.com