Here are the notes from the weekly charm call. Anyone is welcome to join, due to a snafu on the weather knocking out my internet for the beginning we weren’t able to record it, I will fix that for next week:

• https://juju.ubuntu.com/community/weekly-charm-meeting/

Kapil T. brought up that he’s working on some AWS-specific charms and was asking if prefixing provider-specific charms was a good idea: http://jujucharms.com/search?search_text=aws No one objected to this being a bad idea.

You can follow along his AWS charms by checking out recently changed: http://jujucharms.com/recently-changed

Nick Veich (evilnick) has been working on the docs and has a sneak peek:

• https://code.launchpad.net/~evilnick/juju/juju-go-docs
• And Kapil mentioned zencoding is a nice cheating script for working with HTML5: https://code.google.com/p/zen-coding/
• The docs blueprint is here: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/servercloud-1303-juju-docs

Also note that we’re planning on integrating screencasts with the documentation itself, in 5-7 minute snippets. I mentioned that Mark Ramm pointed out the coolest script you’ll read about today:

• https://github.com/rfk/playitagainsam

This allows us to “record” screencasts as replayable demos. Very cool, and will allow us to reshare demos without worrying about fat fingering a live talk. Antonio wanted to point out that we should also investigate integrating the Juju content from Ask Ubuntu right into the documentation itself:

• http://askubuntu.com/questions/tagged/juju?sort=frequent&pagesize=50

Marco wanted to share some of the work he’s been doing on charm runner:

• https://code.launchpad.net/~marcoceppi/charmrunner/respect-mongodb
• https://code.launchpad.net/~marcoceppi/charmrunner/add-server

and lastly … we had Aaron Bentley and Curtis Hovey from the charmworld team asking specifically what exactly is the “charm store”. Right now it’s possible for anyone in ~charmers to push a branch that has not been promulgated into the store to show up in the web UI, and that’s not ideal. Examples include “shelr.tv” and “ubuntu”: http://jujucharms.com/charms/precise/ubuntu

The team agreed this is something we need to fix and right around then we ran out of time.

One of the coolest technologies we ship in Ubuntu is OpenStack. Canonical is proud to be a Platinum Member of the OpenStack Foundation board, and we take shipping an awesome OpenStack very seriously. As of (right now) you’ll find OpenStack “Grizzly” in our Cloud Archive.

So what is it? Last September we announced something that is uniquely to Ubuntu: Fully tested and supported backports of the latest OpenStack to our LTS release. Here’s what it looks like:

So if you’re looking to deploy OpenStack, we’ve not only got OpenStack, but we’re building a set of tools to help you manage and deploy your services on top. Toss in a bit of Metal-as-a-Service and Juju and you’ll be all set to deploy over 120 services right off the bat. Not bad.

Here’s the wiki page with instructions on how to get started on OpenStack, and do stop by our booth at the OpenStack Summit, where we’ll show you how you can use these tools to get you up and running as quickly and easily as possible.

I did the coolest thing last weekend, I volunteered as a judge for the FIRST Robotics Competition here in Livonia, Michigan. The short story is Dean Kamen, the guy who is most famous for inventing the Segway (even though his other inventions seem way more interesting) decided that young people should be motivated by Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. So he created this idea of a robot competion. I know right?

So how it works is that high schools across the country make robots to compete against a certain goal. This year’s contest is called the Ultimate Ascent. The idea is that the robot not only shoots discs for points, at the end of the challenge for the max points it needs to ascend a pyramid. Check out the video, this is not an easy task.

My job was to judge the regional competitions, the winners would go on to the State champtionships, and from there, move on to the Nationals.

So … high schools, competing, with robots … count me in …

And to my luck, I even met a student at Code Red Robotics who know what Ubuntu was, here’s his picture:

I am really glad I got to learn what FIRST was. It is amazing to see what high school kids can come up with. When I was in High School my idea of “awesome” was a SEGA Genesis, and if lucky, I got to be in the Science Olympiad. Meanwhile these kids are making robots capable of shooting disks at over 65 miles an hour.

On top of that as a judge I got to meet some pretty amazing people. People from General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, and Nissan, as well as other companies, I am really proud to be included with such accomplished engineers.

Over the next few days I will post videos from the competition, it gets pretty brutal to watch robots compete; and to me this is the best part, FIRST isn’t just a kid version of a robotic reality show, it has built in governance, with a concept of Gracious Professionalism. So it’s just not about building great robots, it’s about driving kids towards a greater good over elementary, junior high, and high schools.

Wanna get in on FIRST? It’s all over the US, get started here: http://www.usfirst.org/

As part of our effort to understand what our users need out of our tools we now have a top-level survey at juju.ubuntu.com/survey.

This survey will always be up, so if you try Juju and have some feedback for us feel free to fill it out. We’ll also be adding questions over time as we hit the road talking about Juju.

So if you’ve tried Juju and it does (or does not do) what you want, let us know.

I’m looking for a volunteer to write up a charm for Newsblur, which is a host your own OSS news reader. We can’t stop Google Reader from going away, but we can certainly help people deploy Newsblur to the cloud. So I’m looking for someone to make the words “Newsblur can be deployed to the cloud from Ubuntu out of the box” a reality.

We have django, rabbit, mongo, and postgres in the charm store already, so you don’t have to start from scratch. People will probably also want an “all in one” charm that will let them run them all on one machine, but also will want the flexibilty of frontends so it can scale, since presumably people will want to start getting into the hosted reader business.

Either way ping me or join us in #juju to get started. As far as other newsreaders go, we already have Owncloud in the charm store, hopefully Nathan Williams will upgrade it for us over the next few days, so we’ve got you covered there too.

Any other OSS readers we should look at charming up?

We’ve had a breakneck pace of Juju progress over the past few months, I’m going to attempt to summarize all the fabulous work the Ubuntu community has been working on to make deploying applications in the cloud a rockin’ experience.

The Node.js, Django, and Rails charms are what we call “platform charms”. The idea here is to whip up a quick config telling juju where your application lives (github, etc.), then you just pass that along to juju and it’ll deploy your app in the cloud. Check this out for an example. Ideally with these charms we can make any applications written in these stacks to be instantly deployable with little to no work by the user.

Node.js

• Marius B. Kotsbak has been working on our Node.js charm. His first is to add support for updating the user application.
• Marius has a blueprint with how he expects the node charm’s behavior will be fleshed out.
• Feel free to ping Marius or myself if you’re a node.js developer and interested in helping out.

Django

• Patrick Hetu and Bruno Girin have been on a roll lately, check out this post to the django-user’s mailing list asking for feedback on their Django work.

Rails

Lots of activity in Rails this week, thanks to Pavel Pachkovskij from Altoros Inc.

• A Rack charm that let’s you deploy a rack application.
• And you have your choice of which webserver you want to deploy with it, either apache2-passanger, or nginx-passenger.
• And lastly (not in the store yet), there’s an addition of the God monitoring framework, which you can use as a subordinate charm to monitor your deployed stack.

Not a bad set of updates for Rails, we’re hoping that by 14.04 we’ll have a fully instrumented Rack stack that will be tested and scalable for everyone.

Databases

• Stuart Bishop has added master/slave replication to the Postgres charm. You can find out how to use it in the README.
• Antonio Rosales demoed setting up replicasets with the MongoDB charm at MongoDB Austin.

Other updates

And those are just the highlights, a ton of work continues to go into one of our most important set of charms, OpenStack, too many to list here, we’ll just show you at ODS, heh.

• What will become Juju 2.0 has now released version 1.9.11 for your testing pleasure, this is the first time the 2.0 series can run on HP Cloud, so we could use some testing there.

Come check us out at any one of these events in 2013 if you’re interested in learning more.

Just a reminder that we have plenty of UDS Lightning talk slots available!

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UDS-1303/Plenaries

Talks are five minutes and slots go on a first come, first serve basis, and are taking place tommorrow at 1700 UTC.

Finally, one of the longest RT tickets in history has been fixed, the Ubuntu Forums have finally been upgraded to vBulletin 4. Many thanks to the Forums Council, the CC, the Canonical IS team, and an untold number of people who helped make this happen. I feel like we have reached the end of the internet. Of course now, this also means that there will be a new vBulletin tomorrow and we get to start all over. Yay.

One particularly horrible pain point we had was OpenID integration. We needed help with this, and I had a hard time finding someone who could help us out. I was desperate, and put out a call for help.

And in rode Kyle A. Baker, on his pale PHP horse. And busted out the plugin. Done. I asked Kyle how he could be so awesome, so he passed this along to me.

My contributions have ranged from simple how-to blog posts, automated scripts, bug reporting, implementing new features for existing applications, debugging and fixing web cam support in GSPCA for the Microsoft vx-1000 web cam (which are now included in the Kernel by default since back in 2010), the vBulletin 4 OpenID plug-in and many other odds and ends.

Usually my preferred Linux environment is Ubuntu +1 (aka alpha/beta/pre-release), watching the changes that roll in and watching Ubuntu evolve in general. I love the direction that Linux is moving in and hope more people will continue to step forward and volunteer their time towards developing a quality community experience. I’m always interested in helping out on open source projects that benefit everyone, so if you’re looking for volunteers just ping me. Following me on Twitter at @kyleabaker. FOSS for the win!

Without Kyle we’d be in a sad state, so I’d like to thank him for his work, and that goes for everyone involved in cracking this nut, it was a tough one. Beers on me.

Also I bet James Troup that he’d never get the forums upgraded by the “next UDS”. I thought I was going to win, especially with UDS now being a month earlier, but alas, he won with 2 days to spare. Not bad Obama … not bad.

TLDR: 12.04.2 ISOs are NOT just rolled up updates, they’re 12.04 with newer kernels.

I’d like to point out some changes to things that might affect our server users. The last 12.04.2 point release is the first real release where the LTS Enablement Stack is in effect.

There are some things I’d like to highlight for those of you not reading the release notes, as this is different from how we rolled point releases in the past.

• New installs from the 12.04.2 ISOs will get a newer kernel (3.5) than 12.04 (3.2).
• Machines currently running 12.04 will NOT receive these kernel upgrades, only new installs from the new ISOs will get the enablement stacks.

Recommendations:

• The 12.04 and 12.04.1 ISO’s are at http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ - you’ll likely want to keep a set for yourself if you want to roll out with the same exact kernel for your deployments - you’ll probably want to have all three ISO sets on hand depending on your hardware.
• The original 12.04 stack will continue to be maintained for 5 years, if you don’t need the new kernel, you don’t need to use it.
• In the past if new hardware rolled out and didn’t work with the LTS you were kind of stuck with either backporting a kernel, or (what I reluctantly did) deploy a non-LTS release until the next LTS came out, at which point you would rebase on the new LTS.)

What this means is that the life of the LTS is now much longer, while also giving you the option of sticking with a stable userspace with newer hardware support (if you need it). The wiki page has a bunch more details, please check it out.

David Cheney passes along that Juju core 1.9.8 has now been released.

For those not familiar with Juju core, it is the rewrite branch of Juju in golang. The team is now close to feature parity with the Python version, we expect to have something real nice for you by 13.04. :)

My favorite feature here is a real small one, an idea passed along to the team by Rick Spencer. juju generate-config -w will now spit out a configuration file for you. We’ve documented a bunch of providers in there, so out of the box you’ll get AWS, OpenStack, HP Cloud, and the local provider in the config file all commented out, you’ll be able to just paste in your creds and go. This is much nicer than trading snippets with friends.

Here’s the changelog, make sure you check it out, there are still some limitations, like lack of constraints, so be aware. Expect a summarized report on the Go version soon, we’ve inherited some great new features, including better multiplatform support, you’ll find 1.9.8 is working for OSX now.