The growing adoption of Ubuntu Server has accounted for Canonical’s one main reason to focus on development concerning the integration of various components (the OpenStack hypervisor, the distributed filesystem Ceph and orchestration suite Juju), as well as on simplifying the deployment of the various services that can give life to a cloud environment.

Juju, the orchestration suite by Canonical introduced two years ago, is characterized by remarkable ease of use. Juju allows the deployment of applications and can quickly link them within cloud infrastructure with the simple employment of Juju Charms, a deployable bundle of details that allow you to automate the dependencies and inter-relationships of the various services running in the cloud.

Further improvements in Juju’s GUI simplifies searching, dragging and dropping.

Canonical last week announced two new features for DevOps seeking ever faster and easier ways of deploying scalable infrastructure.

Juju Charm bundles

The first feature is Juju Charm bundles that allow you to deploy an entire cloud environment with one click. The main objective of Juju Charm bundles is in fact simplify the user experience and make deploy services faster and scalable.

The bundles include a 7-node starter Hadoop cluster designed to deploy Hadoop in a way that’s easily scalable; a 13-node starter MongoDB cluster; two Mediawiki deployments with load balanced deployment with HAProxy and memcached for horizontally scalable deployment; and a new bundle from SaaS based import.io platform. All of these bundles can be horizontally scaled out of the box.

In addition, the Apache Syncope Juju developed by Tirasa dramatically shortens the product evaluation process and encourages adoption. The company Credativ has come with their OpenERP bundle, which enterprise can instantly deploy an enterprise resource planning solution.

More for developers, Ubuntu has developed a Django bundle with gunicorn and PostgreSQL; two Rails bundles coupled with HAProxy, Memcached, Redis, Nagios (for monitoring), and a Logstash/Kibana (for logging); and a new Wildfly bundle from Technology Blueprint to code, deploy and host application in the cloud.

Juju Quickstart

Quickstart is a Juju plugin that aims to help developers get up and running with Juju faster than any set of commands. Once installed, Quickstart can be used to use deploy Juju environments.

Quickstart can help you configure and setup clouds using LXC (for local environments), OpenStack (which is used for HP Cloud), Windows Azure, and Amazon EC2. It knows what configuration data is required for each cloud provider and provides hints on where to find the information you’ll need.

“Juju Bundles and Quickstart are powerful tools on their own but offer enormous value comes when they are used together. Quickstart can be combined with bundles to rapidly launch Juju, start-up the environment, and deploy an entire application infrastructure, all in one action,” Ubuntu said in a press release.

The two features together work great for testing repeatable deployments. For instance developers can design and configure bundle locally via LXC and, when satisfied, deploy it to a real environment, simply by changing the environment command-line option when launching Quickstart.

With this move, Canonical is adding the capability not just the availability of various developers tools but look to DevOps resources that will enable them to take advantage of cloud automation and big data wave as enterprise shops. Cloud automation, DevOps bundles tools, and big data processing capabilities will give Canonical a giant boost in market share.