What’s the easiest way to start using big software? Meet Conjure-up

Have a big software project you want to get in front of users with the least amount of barriers? Maybe it has a lot of dependencies, target runtimes, and/or micro-service type relationships. Don’t feel like writing a book’s worth of install and configuration documentation?

Wish you could just tell folks to just conjure-up your project? As if it was a magical spell?

Hear about the latest platform but don’t have time to figure out how to begin to deploy it just to give it a try?

Conjure-up is a power tool for getting users using Big Software

The Ubuntu Solutions Engineering team is pleased to announce the first pre-release of conjure-up 2.0!

Conjure-up lets you summon up big-software as a “spell” – a model of a software stack, including all the extra know-how to get you from bits on disk to a fully usable, configured, related deployment. Start using big software instead of learning how to deploy it.

• Want OpenStack? Done, no problem.
• What about Big Data? Like magic.
• Deep Learning? Yep, just like that.
• Kubernetes? Like butter.

Seems simple? It is, with conjure-up.

But wait, that sounds way too easy. What’s the catch?

After picking a spell, conjure-up presents you with a list of targets to deploy to including:

• Major public clouds like EC2, Azure or GCE
• A local (and super fast) deployment with LXD containers
• Bare metal in a MAAS cluster

From there conjure-up can work in two ways:

1. Walkthrough mode: where each spell will present you with a series of panels describing software components and their associated configurations. Users can accept the defaults or modify as needed to fit their particular use case.
2. Default (headless) mode: where a spell can be deployed with all default options, placement and relations bypassing all the walkthrough panels.

Enough with the sales pitch, you’re itching to give it a try right? Let’s get started!

Getting conjure-up

conjure-up is available on both Ubuntu Trusty 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 LTS

$ snap install conjure-up --classic --beta
$ conjure-up

Popular Spells

Kubernetes

The Canonical Distribution of Kubernetes works across all major public clouds and private infrastructure, enabling your teams to operate Kubernetes clusters on demand, anywhere.

$ conjure-up kubernetes

OpenStack

An OpenStack Cloud (Newton release) on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, providing Dashboard, Compute, Network, Block Storage, Object Storage, Identity and Image services.

$ conjure-up openstack

Release Notes

Several bug fixes and new features were introduced in this release. For a full list of what’s changed visit the Releases page.

Feature highlights

• Ability to summon spells from various remote repositories, such as the Juju charm store, GitHub, BitBucket, and privately managed web servers.
• 2 modes of deployments, an Interactive mode which walks you through the entire deploy process. Second, a headless mode for a non-interactive approach to deploying big-software.

Want to get involved?

Please visit our website or join us on IRC to participate in this project:

• Website
• GitHub
• IRC