Recently the Launchpad Red Squad and Product Team started working on a new cloud project. As part of that project we’ll be using Juju, a tool that helps you easily deploy services on the cloud.
As an opportunity to learn more about how Juju works, I wrote a charm to deploy oops-tools, an open source Django application that helps visualize and aggregate error reports from Launchpad, on Amazon’s EC2 and Canonical’s private Openstack cloud.
You might be asking, what’s a charm? Charms are basically instructions on how to deploy services, that can be shared and re-used.
Assuming you already have a bootstrapped juju environment, deploying oops-tools using this charm is as easy as:
$ juju deploy --repository=. local:oops-tools
$ juju deploy --repository=. local:postgresql
$ juju add-relation postgresql:db oops-tools
$ juju expose oops-tools
That’s it! With just a few commands, I have an instance of oops-tools up and running in a few minutes.
Under the hood, the oops-tools charm:
- starts two Ubuntu instances in the chosen cloud provider, one for the webserver and another for the database server
- downloads the latest trunk version of oops-tools and its dependencies from Launchpad
- configures oops-tools to run under Apache’s mod_wsgi
- configures oops-tools to use the database server
There’s still work to do, like add support for RabbitMQ (oops-tools uses rabbit to provide real-time error reports), but this initial iteration proved useful to learn about Juju and how to write a charm. As it is, it can be used by developers who want to hack on oops-tools and can be easily changed to deploy oops-tools in a production environment.
If you’d like to give it a try, you can get the charm here: https://code.launchpad.net/~charmers/charms/oneiric/oops-tools/trunk
Enjoy!
| (“Harry Potter’s The Standard Book of Spells” by Craig Grobler, licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND license) |