Juju community virtual meetup

juju
15

I think that many open-source projects are into this situation where they do not get as much engagement as they would wish for. There are some many different open-source projects that they just have to figure out ways to attract attention. I follow hackernews and I see everyday new mentions of amazing projects that I did not know they existed. And many of them are struggling to create a community.
Among the millions of potential users, even a niche project should be able to do well.

So, what’s going on with Juju?

The barrier of entry to start using Juju is too high. If I were to put myself in the shoes of a new user who just learned about the existence of Juju, has an idea that Juju can help with managing Internet services, what would I need to find?

  1. I would like to see a gentle introduction to Juju. It should be a type of documentation that does not have too much technical requirements for someone to follow. If you want to setup a static website, you can launch a VPS, get a shell there, install nginx and upload the HTML files at the correct directory. If you were to improve on that, you would use configuration management, like Ansible, so that you automate a bit the process. But if you want to go one level ahead, you would use Juju with the appropriate charm for a static website and level up to application management.
  2. I would like to see a tutorial that shows the simplest possible installation of Juju so that I can install myself without much trouble. Most likely this would be LXD using a ZFS storage pool. Juju works great with Kubernetes, but for the purposes of onboarding, LXD should suffice. Install LXD, and bootstrap Juju.
  3. I would like to see a tutorial that shows how to setup a static website with Juju. No need to understand how to make charms, but just to demonstrate the actual use of a charm. Perhaps at the end of the tutorial, discuss that you can put charms together. Possibly, add https with a Let’s Encrypt charm. Then, add multiple websites with a reverse proxy charm.

The above set of three documents would make me have a genuine interest into trying out Juju. There are more things needed next, but that would be an adequate start for me.

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