What's the future of Juju?

Wed Mar 25 21:39:24 UTC 2015

On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 8:24 AM, Merlijn Sebrechts
<merlijn.sebrechts at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 documentation is outdated in a lot of places and that makes it seem as it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.

The services framework is quite new... I've not yet had the chance to
use it yet either.

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

... and yes, I'll try to get some time to reevaluate the saltstack
charm-helpers intergration and see whether it should be fixed or
removed. We (the team I work in) used it initially for some charms,
but then migrated quite soon to use the ansible support which we're
using now, but the next time we write a new charm, we'll evaluate the
services framework instead.

So the issue with the salt support may be that there are no charms
(that I'm aware of) using it and so it is not being integration-tested
regularly (though I'm keen to check).

I'd recommend exactly what you're doing - starting your charm in plain
python. As you develop the charm, you may start to understand the need
for, and use the services framework (or other charm-helper-provided
support).

Cheers,
-Michael

>
>
>
> 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
>>>
>>>
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>>> Juju at lists.ubuntu.com
>>> Modify settings or unsubscribe at:
>>> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/juju
>>>
>>
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