Any Advice on Using Juju for Regular Websites?

[timClicks (Tim McNamara)]

@maaudet

I’m alone in my team that works on Juju Charms. I’ve built about 15 custom charms in order to make everything work. Our business is mainly Magento websites but I’ve adapted the code to support Wordpress and others.

Wow, you’ve done well! This is an excellent post, and I’m really glad that you’ve taken the time to write it.

Fantastic to see that charming is helping e-commerce.

@maaudet

Right now we have 2 clients in production using Juju, but we have spun easily over 2000 sandboxes. I’ve automated everything so much that we only have to deploy a bundle and we get a ready-to-use environment from scratch in under 20 minutes (and for any versions of Magento, as long as the commands work/don’t change).

This is a really interesting quote. So in a sense, your charms are allowing your team to iterate very fast and experiment quickly. What do they think of the support that you can provide? Your colleagues must think that you have superpowers.

@maaudet

The reason why I used custom charms all the way is because there was slight missings in some parts of the available public charms at the time.

This makes sense. Developing (and learning) by yourself can be much simpler than working with an open source project. And for charms, every charm is an open source project. Those improvements seem very impressive though. If you’re able to open source some of your work, many would benefit. Let me know if you would like any assistance in this area.

@maaudet

Subordinate: PHP 5.6, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 (I support the use of multiple PHP versions for each web charms, so we can have a Magento on both PHP 7.0 and 7.2 [for testings] and we can decide which paths runs on which PHP versions)

What an innovative way to use subordinates. Did you see this done anywhere else or did you think of it yourself?

@maaudet

GlusterFS Cluster, it’s managed using custom run commands

Fantastic to see. You should read through the upcoming changes (and perhaps help test!):

Juju Actions: opt-in to new behaviour from Juju 2.8

@maaudet

I’m planning on adding new features next year and start doing more production environments because I see Juju as an opportunity to remove developers root accesses to the servers while providing run commands so that they can still run the commands they need to do (I won’t sleep well at night until the day no devs will have root access to production environments ).

Great to see. Speaking from a security perspective, are you happy with Juju? Can you see anything that needs hardening from its defaults?