Several years ago I set down a path to move my personal infrastructure into juju control. Along the way I’ve written several charms and blog posts about the things I’ve learned and developed. Today I’m happy to announce I’m ending my solo effort because I am being joined by James aka ec0.

Pirate-Charmers

To transition from a single owner to a group, my current charms will be moving to the namespace pirate-charmers both on github as well as on the charm store. New charms will be started directly in this name space.

Github has a very nice redirect system, so that change will be transparent to most readers. The charmstore however, to my knowledge, has no way of addressing such a move. If you currently use any of the charms I maintain today, I recommend moving to the same charm maintained by pirate-charmers when it becomes available. Switching your deployed charms source location can be done with the switch flag as documented on jujucharms.com.

The goal remains the same, James and I both find charms to be a great method for deploying and operating software. We’re still focused on a smaller home lab type environment. While charms for big data and data center scale tooling are becoming more common we’re looking to address the smaller projects that we use ourselves. We’ll certainly leverage components that are already written, but when necessary will write our own charms when the functionally we need is not well addressed by current offerings.

On the horizon

Charms

The HAProxy charm will be seeing a new release on pirate-charmers to make it better support other types of other workloads. The current version has already been migrated to pirate-charmers and the new version will be updated when the new functionally is merged into the master branch.

In addition to HAProxy, charms for ddclient and Weechat have also been pushed to the charm store. With these three charms today, you can stand up Weechat on your own domain name, register TLS certificates, and use an encrypted relay for web/mobile clients. This has been in development for a few weeks, and while I am not yet running it full time I have used it as a backup install and expect to move to it full time soon.

Finally, James has taken on a massive first effort to join in the fun by charming Gitlab. Gitlab will also be deployable behind HAProxy, including forwarding ssh ports.

We don’t currently have, and likely won’t try to maintain a specific roadmap. Generally speaking, we’re going to implement the things we want to run. There might be a reasonable way for us to map out a rough idea and make that known but it’s not a high priority right now.

Bundles

As the number of charmed services increase we would like to provide an easy way to kick-the-tires and demonstrate the charms. That will likely come in the form of pre-defined bundles that allow you to quickly stand up related services. The above mentioned Weechat setup is an example, and Gitlab itself requires several components to get running. By providing a bundle we can easily show how it works and you can integrate that into your environment.

Bundles are also a good way to demonstrate how some of the charms that are out there today can be leveraged with the charms we are writing. Specifically logging, monitoring, and alerting have come to mind as things we will be supporting in our charms.

Blogs

I’ve just about finished the above mentioned Weechat bundle and will plan to post a blog to show how you can quickly deploy a secure persistent Weechat client of your own.