Canonical
on 20 August 2014
“Juju is amazing!” is a phrase we at Canonical have grown accustomed to hearing from customers and prospects who see the powerful service orchestration tool for the first time. The incredible speed and smoothness with which Juju deploys and manages highly complex cloud applications is unrivalled and a well-known fact to anyone using Ubuntu in a cloud environment.
Now, as Juju starts to mature, the industry is taking notice. In a survey of more than 550 respondents conducted by linux.com and The New Stack, Juju came in forth in the “provisioning and management tools” category, edging out well-established competitors like Chef and Vagrant. While we’re very proud of this result, we actually see Juju as much more than a “provisioning” or “management” tool. Unlike most competitors which take a machine-centric view of an environment, Juju is a service-centric orchestration engine. It encapsulates the best practices of deploying and configuring any complex application in a “charm”, making a usually daunting deployment experience easy and repeatable. You no longer need to be or hire an expert in every application you want to deploy. Just deploy an existing charm and connect it to other charms with which it usually interacts, e.g. your database, your load balancer, your monitoring tool, etc. The Juju GUI draws your cloud environment as you build it, so you end up with an accurate diagram of every application and relation you’ve deployed.
Want a complete, ready-made cloud environment? Done. Just import an existing bundle, a collection of charms and their relations, and drop it onto your canvas for a fully deployed application in minutes. Need to scale out? No problem, just drag and drop a few more instances of your charm and voila, your capacity has just gone up! Take a look at how we used Juju to deploy some highly sophisticated apps onto IBM POWER8 in this video.
But the magic of Juju doesn’t end there. It’s not just that it runs on any environment that runs Ubuntu, be it a public cloud, a private OpenStack cloud, or an LXC container. Juju’s real power is in its ability to enable innovation. If you’re an ISV looking to sell into an enterprise, creating a charm for your application makes it far easier to demo and more portable, allowing you to get your software into the hands of its end users quickly without having to navigate the unwieldy corridors of enterprise procurement departments. Watch this space for more on how to join our charm partner programme soon.
Other open source projects that showed up strong in the survey were, unsurprisingly, OpenStack, Docker, and KVM. We’re particularly fond of all 3 projects: Canonical was one of the first backers of OpenStack, and Ubuntu OpenStack is the world’s most popular OpenStack distribution according to the most recent OpenStack Foundation survey. Docker is fully integrated with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and many companies are already doing very cool things with Docker on Ubuntu. Finally, KVM is our hypervisor of choice and the one we recommend to all of our OpenStack customers.
To learn more about Juju, or try your hand at writing a charm, visit our Juju page.
For more on Ubuntu OpenStack and our various reference architectures, take a look at our Ubuntu OpenStack page.
Finally, you can view the full results of the survey here.
