Other software similar to Juju

Question

I have been working with Juju for quite some time now. I am interested is there other similar software that serves the same purpose as Juju (cluster deployment and management in terms of services)?

The software should be able to set up machines easily, deploy software on them, configure and install, and some client should keep track of these machines (their status etc.). Remote provisioning should be simple also. There should be some simple mechanism of stitching these machines together to cooperate. Finally, scaling should be very straightforward. Everything should be as automated as possible (once set up).

Answer 1

There are three major cluster deployment software.

First and my favourite is Kubernetes. You can hear explanations how it works in those two great talks:

James Strachan - Continuous Delivery of Microservices with Kubernetes

Matthew Bates - Kube all the Things

Kubernetes

The second is Docker Swarm, created and managed by Docker themselves.

Docker Swarm

And the third is Mesosphere which is datacenter container orchestration software

Mesosphere

Answer 2

Kubernetes for sure. The referred link provides a great explanation, but to keep it simple, they self-define as:

an open-source platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts, providing container-centric infrastructure.

Key characteristics are:

• portable: public, private, hybrid, multi-cloud
• extensible: modular, pluggable, hookable, composable
• self-healing: auto-placement, auto-restart, auto-replication, auto-scaling

It's a fairly recent project, but there is plenty of documentation available. Naturally, you can run it in Ubuntu. This official guide and this unofficial guide (explicitly for 16.04) are great starting points.