Install Juju

Juju is an open source application modelling tool that allows you to deploy, configure, scale and operate your software on public and private clouds.

In the previous step, we installed, deployed and configured MAAS to use as a foundation for Juju to deploy a fully fledged OpenStack cloud.

We are now going to install and configure the following two core components of Juju to use our MAAS deployment:

  • The controller is the management node for a cloud environment. We’ll be using the MAAS node we tagged with juju to host the Juju controller.

  • The client is used by the operator to talk to one or more controllers, managing one or more different cloud environments. As long as it can access the controller, almost any machine and operating system can run the Juju client.

Package installation

We’re going to start by installing the Juju client on a machine running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial) with network access to the MAAS deployment. For other installation options, see Getting started with Juju.

To install Juju, enter the following in the terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository -u ppa:juju/stable
sudo apt install juju

Client configuration

The Juju client needs two pieces of information before it can control our MAAS deployment.

  1. A cloud definition for the MAAS deployment. This definition will include where MAAS can be found and how Juju can authenticate itself with it.

  2. A separate credentials definition that’s used when accessing MAAS. This links the authentication details to the cloud definition.

To create the cloud definition, type juju add-cloud mymaas to add a cloud called mymaas. This will produce output similar to the following:

Cloud Types
  maas
  manual
  openstack
  vsphere

Select cloud type:

Enter maas as the cloud type and you will be asked for the API endpoint URL. This URL is the same as the URL used to access the MAAS web UI in the previous step: http://<your.maas.ip>:5240/MAAS/.

With the endpoint added, Juju will inform you that mymass was successfully added. The next step is to add credentials. This is initiated by typing juju add-credential mymaas. Enter admin when asked for a credential name.

Juju will output the following:

Enter credential name: admin

Using auth-type "oauth1".

Enter maas-oauth:

The oauth1 credential value is the MAAS API key for the admin user. To retrieve this, login to the MAAS web UI and click on the admin username near the top right. This will show the user preferences page. The top field will hold your MAAS keys:

MAAS API key

MAAS API key

Copy and paste this key into the terminal and press return. You will be informed that credentials have been added for cloud mymaas.

You can check the cloud definition has been added with the juju clouds command, and you can list credentials with the juju credentials command.

Testing the environment

The Juju client now has everything it needs to instruct MAAS to deploy a Juju controller.

But before we move on to deploying OpenStack, it’s worth checking that everything is working first. To do this, we’ll simply ask Juju to create a new controller for our cloud:

juju bootstrap --constraints tags=juju mymaas maas-controller

The constraint in the above command will ask MAAS to use any nodes tagged with juju to host the controller for the Juju client. We tagged this node within MAAS in the previous step.

The output to a successful bootstrap will look similar to the following:

Creating Juju controller "maas-controller" on mymaas
Looking for packaged Juju agent version 2.2-alpha1 for amd64
Launching controller instance(s) on mymaas...
 - 7cm8tm (arch=amd64 mem=2G cores=2)
Fetching Juju GUI 2.4.4
Waiting for address
Attempting to connect to 192.168.100.106:22
Bootstrap agent now started
Contacting Juju controller at 192.168.100.106 to verify accessibility...
Bootstrap complete, "maas-controller" controller now available.
Controller machines are in the "controller" model.
Initial model "default" added.

If you’re monitoring the nodes view of the MAAS web UI, you will notice that the node we tagged with juju starts deploying Ubuntu 16.04 LTS automatically, which will be used to host the Juju controller.

Next steps

We’ve now installed the Juju client and given it enough details to control our MAAS deployment, which we’ve tested by bootstrapping a new Juju controller. The next step will be to use Juju to deploy and link the various components required by OpenStack.