Charm Partner Newsletter

Welcome to the first edition of Canonical’s Charm Partner Newsletter. Read about the growing Juju ecosystem,  including the most recent additions to our Charm Store and our Charm Partner Programme. You’ll also learn about the latest features to land in Juju and tips and tricks from our Juju engineers.

Overview

We have welcomed a number of new partners to the Charm Programme, particularly in the Big Data space.  Along our continued internal effort to deliver charms for the the “classic” components of Big Data stacks (like Hadoop, Spark and ELK), we’ve seen the ecosystem of partners at the consumption level grow significantly: Meteorite.bi’s Saiku and France Labs’ Datafari are both workloads that plug onto Hadoop and other noSQL datastores and offer exploration, analytics and search capabilities.

On the infrastructure side, quasardb joined to increase the number of scale out databases now available through Juju to build bigger and stronger services.  We’ll be showing demos and presentations of all these new workloads this week at Strata+Hadoop World in New York. Come by Booth 358 booth and say hi!

To see the full list of our new partners, skip down to Ecosystem Growth below.

What’s new in Juju?

You can always check out what’s new in release of Juju by checking the release notes. As of this writing the latest version is 1.24.6. You’re encouraged to upgrade between the minor versions of Juju (the 6 in this case), as these are always bug-fix-only releases. If you’re not on the 1.24 series at all, the following features are the highlights if they’re of interest to you:

• VMWare (vSphere) Provider
• Resource Tagging (EC2, OpenStack)
• MAAS root-disk Constraint
• Service Status
• CentOS 7 Preview
• Storage (experimental)

Enhancing your Charms with Juju Actions

We rolled out a few new features to help promote recommended charms. Today we’re going to talk about Juju Actions. Juju actions is a way for you to run custom scripts onto services or units you’ve already deployed.

If you were setting up a bundle, and then afterwards ssh’ing into individual units to set up a test run or doing a benchmark, we now have a way for you to do this automatically. We’ve got a complete set of documentation for actions for you to check out. Actions work best for tasks that you can automate and apply across a service, regardless of how many units there are.

Examples are always helpful, here are a few we’ve selected:

• http://ubunt.eu/YSQQaa
• http://ubunt.eu/iITYhW

In the past you had to ssh into individual hadoop nodes to prep directories and do maintenance before you could test your cluster with a terasort, now you can just do:

$ juju action do plugin/0 terasort
Action queued with id: cbd981e8-3400-4c8f-8df1-c39c55a7eae6
$ juju action fetch –wait 0 cbd981e8-3400-4c8f-8df1-c39c55a7eae6

and get your results. And lastly, here’s a relatively complex action that executes a stress test on a Cassandra cluster and then reporting the results back to a benchmark GUI: http://ubunt.eu/LTsoPP

Ecosystem Growth

New Charms!

We’ve welcomed a number of new partner charms to recommended status, including the  PlumGrid ONS for OpenStack and Zulu 8.  Recommended status is important to achieve as it lets users know that your charm has been tested by Juju experts and can be trusted to ‘just work.’  Additionally, recommended charms are promoted within the Juju Charm Store and easier for users to find.

PLUMgrid ONS for OpenStack is a comprehensive software suite that enables secure and scalable virtual network infrastructure for SDN and NFV deployments. PLUMgrid ONS provides secure data center segmentation with traffic isolation and policy enforcements for multi-tenancy. Built on PLUMgrid Platform® and IO Visor® technology, ONS enables terabits of scale out performance, production grade resiliency and rapid service insertion to connect applications seamlessly across virtual machines, containers, and bare metal resources. Find out more in the Juju Charm Store.

Zulu® is a certified, multi-platform build of OpenJDK that is compliant with the Java SE 8, 7, and 6 standards. It allows developers and operations teams to accelerate their use of open source cloud-based Java, with confidence that their Java platform meets all the Java SE standards and incorporates the latest OpenJDK security patches.  Visit the Juju Charm Store to deploy their new charm!

New Partners

Here’s the full list of the latest partners to join our Charm Programme.  We are always looking for ways to increase integration between our partners and their charms, so if you have an idea about a new solution or bundle, feel free to reach out to us and we’ll put you in contact.

7iSolutions

7iSolutions packages SiouxApps, which are enhanced, open source applications such as Redmine, DokuWiki, WordPress, Subversion and others. The applications are pre­configured for business use and are easy to manage by any administrator. 7iSolutions provides optional on-demand training and support.

AppFormix

AppFormix empowers operators to have better visibility and control into their virtualized environments. The software solution allows users to monitor and control in real time how  applications consume available infrastructure resources across VMs and containers, whether in  the public cloud or on-premise.

Azul Systems

Azul has charmed its open source Zulu®, a certified, multi-platform build of OpenJDK that is compliant with the Java SE 8, 7, and 6 standards. Zulu makes it easy for developers and operations teams to accelerate their use of open source cloud-based Java with confidence that their Java platform will meet all the Java SE standards and incorporate the latest OpenJDK security patches.

Certivox

CertiVox delivers a certificate-less next generation key management service called the Distributed Trust Authority, which fixes the fundamental design flaws that affect public key infrastructures. It’s secure and scalable for the Internet of Things.

Expeto

Expeto offers the entire LTE core network stack in a Platform as a Service model. Using Network Function Virtualization as a base, the on-demand, cloud environment can be scaled in milliseconds where, and when needed. The PaaS solution ensures more revenue is retained by the communications service provider and not distributed to proprietary hardware and software vendors. The core service offering from Expeto is called EPIC. This stands for “Evolved Packet core Integrated Cloud”. It is a fully virtualized, on-demand cloud-based offering which virtualizes the core network components within a wireless operators LTE deployment.

France Labs

France Labs is joining our Charm Partner Programme, and bringing with them Datafari the only open source, scale out search engine available on the market. To our customers using Juju, this means they can now leverage any content in their Hadoop clusters and present it to their internal and external users with a dead simple interface. All of which happens completely automatically and in minutes. We’re looking forward to demoing a first integration at Strata+Hadoop in New York City this week (Booth 358) to show how Juju and Datafari create value for Hadoop users.

Incubio

Incubio, the world’s third largest Big Data startup incubator, will initially be charming their open source YIELD product, which provides API’s for developers to create and run Hadoop and Spark applications.  Based in Barcelona, they specialize in early stage projects that use Big Data to create projects that offer business processes as a service.  They help to guide entrepreneurs throughout the entire process of creating a business, from the idea stage to building a viable product and accessing finance. Incubio will be expanding their business to more markets in January, while keeping Juju at the heart of their operations. We expect more than 100 new startups to be using Juju over the upcoming 12 months.

Meteorite BI

Meteorite BI is the company behind Saiku, a 100% web based analytics and data exploration application. Saiku combines highly flexible, easy to use analytics with performance querying to allow users to find and view information that matters to them quickly. To read more about their experience with Juju, click here.

Objectif Libre

Objectif Libre will be charming CloudKitty, a component for OpenStack that seeks to fill the void between Ceilometer and billing by addressing pricing, rating, and chargeback issues. With its modular approach, it is simple to customize to best fit your needs.

quasardb

quasardb is a very fast and scalable distributed key-value store used in production in several banks, including Exane Derivatives, an affiliate of BNP Paribas. It scales horizontally and vertically for virtually unlimited capabilities, without any compromise regarding reliability and consistency.

Vedams

Vedams is the lead developer of Tulsi, a open source tool used to monitor the health of a Swift cluster. Tulsi checks the status of drives and services on a Swift cluster and provides a graphical view of individual node status in the cluster, including an overall view of the health of the cluster.

Upcoming Events

Strata Hadoop

Come and visit us at Strata Hadoop in New York City this week! We’ll be in Booth 358 showing off all the exciting things going on with Juju and Big Data. For more information, visit http://strataconf.com/ny15.

Juju Office hours

Join our next Office Hour on 1 October 2015. Juju Office Hours is a freeflow meeting where we discuss what’s happening in and around the ecosystem, what hot new changes are landing in charms and Juju itself, and our favorite part, you can join in and ask the team questions about anything Juju related.

Visit http://ubuntuonair.com for the feed, if you want to join into the hangout itself we’ll post the URL in the IRC channel #juju

8pm UTC, 4pm EDT, 1pm PDT