Canonical today announced multiple signatories to its Juju Charm Partner Program (CPP), adding leading storage and networking solutions to the catalogue of public Juju charms. New additions include Nuage Networks from Nokia, CloudBase Solutions, Midokura and Quobyte.

The emergence of "big software" - complex topologies of software components that must be managed at scale in dynamic environments - has raised the importance of operations in a hybrid cloud world. Integration and operations now consume a significant share of IT budgets.

"Big software is a phase change in operations caused by rising scale and complexity," said Mark Shuttleworth, Founder, Canonical. "Model-driven operations with Juju use shared, open source operations code for common components, so companies can focus precious resources on creating software that is unique to their business."

Canonical's award-winning model-driven operations system Juju enables reusable, open source operations across hybrid cloud and physical infrastructure. Integration and operations are encoded in "charms" by vendors and the community of experts familiar with an app. These charms are reused by ops teams as standardised operations code that evolves along with the software itself.

"Eliminating the friction of software evaluation, integration, operations and support is a great outcome for both buyers and sellers of software" said Stefan Johansson, Global Software Alliances Director, Canonical.

The growing use of Juju for large-scale OpenStack operations, highlighted in the latest user survey by the OpenStack Foundation, has increased the value of software-defined networking and storage charms.

"With this MidoNet Charm, we are delighted to further our integration with Ubuntu, the leader in global OpenStack deployments," said Adam Johnson, Midokura VP of Business. "Just like MidoNet, Charms improve the deployment and manageability of any Ubuntu OpenStack deployment. The past year has seen a steady growth in Midokura's technical, marketing and sales collaboration with the team at Canonical, and we look forward to more joint successes in the coming year."

"Nuage Networks' participation in the Charm Partner Program and development of our own Juju charms will automate deployment of our Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) for our service provider and enterprise customers. This is an important milestone in our partnership with Canonical to offer joint solutions that help customers deploy their business applications quickly, securely and at scale," said Charles Ferland, Vice President, Business Development, Nuage Networks from Nokia.

Rapid growth in demand for cost-effective storage underpins the development of several software-defined storage charms, both for OpenStack deployments and as standalone large-scale storage on commodity servers and disks.

"Juju Charms are a great technology for modelling and deploying complex distributed systems. With the Quobyte charms, we can deploy our data center file system in a versatile and simple way for standalone installations as well as integrated block and file storage for OpenStack," said Felix Hupfeld, CTO, Quobyte Inc.

Charms are cross-platform, enabling the seamless integration of workloads running natively on both Windows and Linux, on both cloud and physical infrastructure.

Alessandro Pilotti, Cloudbase Solutions CEO, said: "Juju's ability to implement profound change at scale for elaborate enterprise environments is truly unique and powerful. We are honored to join Canonical's Charm Partner Programme, and have the opportunity to bring our catalog of enterprise Windows Charms, and our custom enterprise Juju Charm development service to a vibrant and growing ecosystem."

Breakout companies Treasure Data, Datafellas, Elastisys, LeoStream, Listeq and Caringo also recently signed to Canonical's CPP in order to speed the adoption of their solutions in big data and high-performance computing.

"The collection of public charms is a fast path to successful operations in an increasingly complex world" said Milan Vaclavik, who leads business development for the Charm Partner Program at Canonical. "Whether you want to spin up an OpenStack cloud or manage a big data cluster, whether you are interested in container orchestration or machine learning, the Juju charm store includes open source and proprietary solutions that dramatically simplify operations for those classes of big software."