Last week I wrote about the juju charm contest. We’re giving away three prizes, the top prize is $300 Amazon gift card, and then a $100 gift card for the 2nd and 3rd prizes.
So far we’ve seen activity on charms for StackMobile, Symfony, and lodgeit.
Right now we have 51 official charms in the Charm Store, out of a total of 130ish bzr branches. We will supporting these charms througout the life of 12.04, and unlike the Ubuntu archive we will be accepting updates and new charms post-release, so if you’re looking for some flexibility when deploying in the cloud, we can help.
Very soon (Real Soon Now), the CLI charm store will be deployed, which will make things much easier for server users to use, and is close enough to apt where your brain can more easily abstract that you’re doing something similar, just across machines and instances. But like apt, the tool is only useful as the content in the archive, this is why I’m on and on about charms.
We’ve got some resources set aside for you if you’re going to participate in the contest, or if you want to get your project easily installable for Ubuntu cloud users:
- We have a juju Charm School webinar - This is going to be an indpeth guide to rocking charms, going over best practices, how a charm is structured, and and overall view of the charm store. In that link there’s a link to the first webinar we did, if you’re still lost on what juju is I recommend watching that.
- We’re all over #juju on Freenode, the juju tag, and the mailing list if you need help or have questions.
So, if there’s something you’d like to see easily deployable check out the list of available charms, and if what you love is missing, check the bug tracker and get started!
I’m not a judge in the contest, but here are some things I think would be useful to users if you’re looking for ideas. I try to think it as, “If I were to start a startup right now and wanted to run some of my infrastructure, what would I need?”:
- Gitolite would be cool, I am sure many organizations need to host their own code internally, especially when you pair it with something like:
- Reviewboard - Code Review tool for teams.
- BigBlueButton - This one will be more complicated, but would be a nice contribution.
- The world needs Firefox Sync (the server side piece) charmed so that people can run their own FF sync servers.
Got other ones? Let me know in the comments!