juju vs. Puppet/Chef/Salt/Ansible/etc.

[Michael Nelson]

On Tue, Dec 9, 2014 at 10:35 AM, Eric Snow <eric.snow at canonical.com> wrote:
> The reaction I get most often from folks that aren't familiar with
> juju and skim through the juju site is that it looks like a competitor
> to the various configuration management tools out there like Puppet or
> Salt.  However, my experience is that while they have some overlap,
> they sit at different layers.
>
> Have I grown out of touch?  Conceivably those projects have or are
> working on juju-like functionality that I'm not aware of.  If not (or
> even if so), what's the best way to educate people on what juju is and
> how it will help them when they're already steeped in the lower-layer
> config. management world?
>
> Related to that, how can we help those same folks wrap all their
> existing recipes, etc. in charms?  It's got to be easy enough that
> they can justify the effort.

Hi Eric,

In online-services we've been using ansible together with juju for
quite a while, and have pushed some generic helpers into charm-helpers
that allow running a hook to equate to running all tasks in a playbook
tagged with the hook name [1][2]. After using that for over a year,
we've also developed some reusable ansible roles which make it much
easier for us to maintain lots of charms, but ymmv (as they're often
for specific ways which we need to do things, like deploying code from
a swift container, or setting up nrpe checks etc.) [3]

Using those ansible helpers within juju really won't allow you to
simply re-use your ansible playbook, but it's pretty easy to adapt an
ansible playbook to a charm (ie. just tagging tasks for certain
relations).

Cheers,
Michael

[1] https://micknelson.wordpress.com/2013/11/08/juju-ansible-simpler-charms/
[2] https://github.com/absoludity/charm-bootstrap-ansible
[3] https://micknelson.wordpress.com/2014/06/10/reusable-ansible-roles-for-juju-charms/