

Juju's new web interface provides a quick overview over all the applications instances deployed with the tool

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has introduced a new web interface for the company's software deployment tool Juju at the OpenStack Developer Summit in San Diego. In a blog post, Ubuntu Cloud Community Liaison Jorge Castro has pointed to a test installation of the tool, which can be used to get a feel for the new interface.

The web UI gives access to Juju's command-line features in an easier-to-use environment which offers more visual feedback. Users can deploy software, check its deployment status and assign relationships between different instances. This allows users to, for example, bring up an installation of WordPress and then connect it to an already-installed database. Clicking on an instance brings up a detailed view of running processes and allows users to view any errors that have occurred. A notification area in the top right corner also aggregates alerts and errors across all instances.

Juju provides a number of "charms", which are collections of scripts to install pre-configured software packages almost instantly. Charms exist for a wide variety of different software packages from system-level tools such as databases to applications like MediaWiki and WordPress. Applications installed in such a way are usually sanely configured out of the box and ready for use. Canonical curates a collection of Juju charms on its Charm Store.

Juju itself is available in Ubuntu from the official repositories and can be used on single servers as well as together with an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution such as OpenStack. Source code for the Juju web interface is available from Launchpad and is licensed under the GPLv3.

(fab)