[ubuntu-cloud] Does JuJu support Rackspace Public Cloud?

[Kapil Thangavelu]

Hi Brian, 

Just to be clear, well-written charms are provider agnostic. Juju has and will 
continue to provide abstraction/compatibility layers as needed to help make
ensure that. So extant charms should work the same way on openstack as they do
on ec2. Of course charms can choose to use provider specific functionality, but 
such a charm wouldn't likely be part of an official/curated charm collection, 
though it would be easily discoverable/installable via a charm equivalent to a 
personal package archive.

Support for public clouds using the openstack native api for juju is 
clearly important and something juju will work towards. Its not really something 
that can be done at the charm level, its at juju internal interaction with the 
provider level. That interaction is abstracted and already supports several 
providers (ec2, orchestra, lxc). Its really just a question of adding in an 
additional one.

Regarding CMDB integration, that's really outside of the purview of juju. Its a 
a deployment specific concern, and juju tries hard not to create policy choices 
on tool selections. ie. just pick your own monitoring, alerting, inventory 
charms. Juju can make it easy to install such tools onto installations and 
potentially offer its own metadata for collection by a cmdb tool.

cheers,

Kapil

Excerpts from brian mullan's message of Wed Dec 14 13:27:02 -0500 2011:
> Thanks Kapil...
> 
> That's what I was wondering.    The Rackspace eng I talked to indicated the
> move to openstack but didn't know if any work had been done on ubuntu juju
> implementation to support Rackspace.
> 
> No where could I find docs/blog etc that said juju charms could really
> deploy to rackspace openstack (if/where its available).
> 
> I hope that happens because the interest in openstack is very strong.
> Having some degree of independence regarding
> virtual environments by various service providers is as important today as
> yesterday to avoid lockin.
> 
> So Dell, HP, Rackspace and others have moved to OpenStack.   If Ubuntu
> wants to become host/client of choice then juju support will be important
> and so will be the addition of some kind of  CMDB capability.   At service
> provider level managing all resources becomes much more important...
> trouble ticketing, network reliability, compute/storage resource  failure
> reporting etc.    I'd mentioned this to a couple acquaintances at canonical
> in the server eng. group.   something like opencmdb from germany looks
> interesting because it is open source & utilizes some of the same gpl tools
> ubuntu does in orchrestra/juju.
> 
> As for Rackspace... just now received on my cell phone a ping from Mitch
> Garnatt (python Boto ec2/euca tool)...  "HP Cloud Services is dropping EC2
> API and will now support only OpenStack NOVA."
> 
> So HP public cloud, Rackspace public cloud moving to openstack...  gotta be
> able to use juju to deploy to them.   Maybe this is a new biz for some good
> sysadmins... produce Charms  that do support these public cloud
> providers...??
> 
> Anyway... the juju should help openstack really lead and support of these
> types of  initiatives will be important.
> 
> collaboration...?
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 10:29 AM, Kapil Thangavelu <
> kapil.thangavelu at canonical.com> wrote:
> 
> > Excerpts from brian mullan's message of Wed Dec 14 08:08:16 -0500 2011:
> > > Anything I've found so far talks about Juju support for Eucalyptus, AWS
> > and
> > > OpenStack.
> > >
> > > I've just started looking at Rackspace and from what I can tell their
> > > public cloud is OpenStack based.
> > >
> > > If that's the case it made me wonder if someone today can use Juju from
> > say
> > > their home PC deploy a Juju charm to RackSpace's cloud and end up with a
> > > running server of what that charm deploys?
> > >
> > > Can this be done today or is it something that someone would have to add
> > to
> > > Juju to support Rackspace's OpenStack public cloud?
> > >
> >
> > Rackspace is not a supported provider for juju at the moment. Though
> > Rackspace
> > is moving towards adopting openstack for their public cloud, my
> > understanding is that is neither complete nor do they intend to expose
> > the openstack ec2 api compatibility layer used by juju. A juju machine
> > provider
> > would need to be implemented to support the native rackspace cloud api
> > (perhaps
> > via libcloud).
> >
> > cheers,
> >
> > Kapil
> >