One of the many activities you can work on during Jams is improving the Cloud stuff we have around Ubuntu. This includes Ubuntu Cloud, Juju and Charms. The activity we will focus on here is Charms, which require a lot of attention.

Juju Charms

Charms are encapsulated services, which you can easily deploy to the cloud. They also contain best-practices, so people who deploy them will know that the service has been installing following the recommendations from upstream. If you want to contribute to charms, there are several things you can do.

But first things first - let's get you to install Juju. You can find information on how to do that on your machine over here. Also, if you have never used Amazon Web Services in the past and want to give real cloud deployments instead of local ones a try, make sure to check out AWS' free tier. If you deploy using the free tier, make sure to specify the "--constraints "cpu-power=0 mem=512M"" flag on the "juju bootstrap" command to launch t1.micros instead of m1.smalls, the default machine for Juju and AWS.

Develop a Charm

We are always trying to improve the number of services that are in the Charm Store. In order to do this, we need more Charms! If you want to get started on writing one, please take a look at the following page. We are always looking for new submissions.

If you have any questions about developing your charm, please join us at #juju on irc.freenode.net, or send an email to juju@lists.ubuntu.com

Reporting Bugs

If you happen to be playing around with Juju and find out that a Charm is not working as expected, please file a bug against it. That way you or someone else can take a look at it and ensure that we've got quality Charms in the store!