As a part of our commitment on delivering more significant value to our user community, we will be focusing our development efforts going forward on the Bundle successor - Stacks (more details to follow in the future), and on extending the capabilities of the Juju Terraform Provider.
Effective November 1 2024, we will no longer accept new bundle registrations to Charmhub. Juju will still be able to deploy bundles, and those that already have bundles registered will continue to be able to publish to them, but charmcraft register-bundle will stop working, and the store will reject any request for a new bundle name.
Bundles were introduced many years ago as a way of packaging up groups of charms and their relations. They have suffered throughout the years though, by not being a first class citizen in the Juju model itself. That is to say, once a bundle is deployed, the very notion of the bundle disappears and you’re left with “just a bunch of charms and relations”.
The ability to deploy a collection of charms, and codify the relations between them is absolutely useful, though. In the long term, this functionality will be provided by Stacks - a new Juju construct that will in fact exist in the model, and will manage the lifecycle of that group of charms and relations throughout their lives - enabling workflows such as juju deploy openstack, and some months later: juju refresh openstack.
As a stop-gap, last year we introduced the Terraform provider for Juju, which bridges some of the gaps we have with bundles by maintaining its own version of state.
If you would like to create a Bundle after November 1 2024 please consider using the Juju Terraform provider to describe your system deployment via a Terraform Plan. The Terraform provider is now a mature product capable of managing all resources previously managed by Bundles, and more.
We understand that these changes can impact your plans, and we’re committed to helping you transition smoothly. Please feel free to reach out for support or assistance.