What's the future of Juju?

Wed Mar 25 21:24:33 UTC 2015

Thanks for your answer! I didn't know Windows and Centos support was coming
so soon, great to know!

The lacking documentation is the biggest issue to me. The charm-helpers
documentation is outdated in a lot of places and that makes it seem as it
isn't being actively maintained anymore. Ofcourse, this is a side-effect of
a rapidly expanding product...
The charm-helpers documentation also lacks some good examples and
"guidelines". Things like "What's the best way to create templates, What's
the easiest way to get relation data, ..". The documentation shows you how
to do it in bash, but is really lacking for python. I had a really hard
time trying to decipher how the services framework works exactly. Then
again, this is probably also partly due to the fact that I'm still learning
my way around python.

As for the bugs. I submitted/"affects me" a few:
Critical:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/juju-deployer/+bug/1434458

Medium:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/charm-tools/+bug/1433035
https://bugs.launchpad.net/juju-core/+bug/1415176
https://bugs.launchpad.net/juju-core/+bug/1429790
https://bugs.launchpad.net/juju-core/+bug/1316174

Feature request:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/juju-core/+bug/1432331

The saltstack charm-helpers integration also has few problems. I just gave
up on it and wrote the install hooks in python.

2015-03-25 21:32 GMT+01:00 Nate Finch <nate.finch at canonical.com>:

> I'm a core dev on Juju, I can answer some, but not all of these questions.
>
>
> First off, as far as long term commitment for Juju - Juju is a huge part
> of Canonical's long term strategy... right up there with the Ubuntu Phone
> and Ubuntu itself.  The Juju team has been expanding hugely in the last
> couple years... I forget exactly the numbers we're at now, but it's an
> order of magnitude more people working on Juju than there were just a
> couple years ago.
>
> Juju is used *extensively* internally at Canonical.  We have a mandate
> that all internal services be deployed via Juju.
>
> As far as supporting other operating systems, we actually do support
> Windows, right now (though it can be a little tricky to set up, and
> generally only works on private clouds, due to licensing restrictions on
> distributing Windows images).  See here:
> http://www.cloudbase.it/windows-with-juju-and-maas/   (Cloudbase
> partnered with us to get Juju working with Windows)
>
> Cloudbase is also currently tackling CentOS support.  It currently works
> and is just being cleaned up, it should be available for testing in a few
> weeks.
>
> The number of features that have landed in the last year is tremendous -
> high availability, networking, storage, major improvements in the GUI,
> support for more clouds (Google Cloud Compute support is coming out with
> 1.23, which is due any day now), Windows support, backup and restore....
>
> As for bugs, there are bugs in every product, especially new and rapidly
> expanding products, like Juju.  If there are particular bugs that concern
> you, we'd be happy to look into them.  We try to make sure that we fix
> anything that is a regression or would majorly hinder usage.... we do use
> this internally after all, so believe me, we hear about it when things
> aren't working well! :)
>
> I'm sorry you find the documentation lacking. We have been putting effort
> into that recently.  I, personally, am a big fan of extensive
> documentation, and I know our documentation is not nearly as extensive as
> it could be.
>
> I can't personally talk about big companies using Juju... I know we have
> several very large companies doing very large installations, but I don't
> think anything is public about that.  Hopefully someone else can bring up a
> list of people using Juju.
>
> Hope that answers at least some of your questions.
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 4:01 PM, Merlijn Sebrechts <
> merlijn.sebrechts at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi
>>
>>
>> I'm interested in what the future of Juju is. From the small experience
>> I've had with it, it seems like a product with a lot of potential. It fills
>> a gap in our project that no other technology can fill. Its biggest
>> strength is how relations between services are managed. This is something
>> that, to my knowledge, does not exist in any tool today. It enables a very
>> modular approach and solves a lot of problems we would have with other
>> tools.
>>
>> However, I've also seen some things that worry me. Even after three
>> years, there are still a lot of bugs in the project. The documentation is
>> lacking, especially in the parts of Juju that are the most competitive. The
>> community is also very small. The fact that it can still only manage Ubuntu
>> servers worries me too. I could go more into detail here, but I don't think
>> it is relevant to this question.
>>
>> I'm considering starting a big long-term project on top of Juju. The
>> project would be very dependent on Juju, so I don't want to do this if
>> there is a chance that Juju will be abandoned in 5 years...
>>
>> What can you tell me about the future of Juju? Things I'm interested in:
>>
>> - Big companies building services on top of Juju
>>
>> - Statements of long-term commitment from Canonical
>>
>> - Usage statistics
>>
>> - Statements of commitment to support other distro's
>>
>> - .. or else, signs that Juju doesn't have a bright future.
>>
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> --
>> Juju mailing list
>> Juju at lists.ubuntu.com
>> Modify settings or unsubscribe at:
>> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/juju
>>
>>
>
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