12-Factor app support in Charmcraft and Rockcraft

Charmcraft and Rockcraft natively support a simple way to deploy and operate 12-Factor web applications.

This support makes it easy to utilize existing Canonical products, such as databases, ingress and observability, in web applications. Flask, Django, FastAPI and Go are currently supported with additional frameworks coming soon.

With a few simple commands, you can set up a fully integrated and observable Kubernetes environment for your web application. These commands create production-ready OCI-compliant container images for your web application and software operators wrapped around the container images. From there, you can deploy your web application, connect it to a database, add ingress and observability and much more.

The solution is aimed at developers who create applications based on the 12-factor methodology. Web developers and operators can take advantage of the solution to simplify their operations and deploy their applications to production.

The foundations: Juju, charms and rocks

The 12-factor web application solution uses and combines capabilities from the following Canonical products:

  • Juju is an open source orchestration engine for software operators that enables the deployment, integration and lifecycle management of applications at any scale and on any infrastructure.

  • A charm is an operator - business logic encapsulated in reusable software packages that automate every aspect of an application’s life.

  • Charmcraft is a CLI tool that makes it easy and quick to initialize, package, and publish charms.

  • Rockcraft is a tool to create rocks – a new generation of secure, stable and OCI-compliant container images, based on Ubuntu.

A Rockcraft framework (conceptually similar to a snap extension) is initially used to facilitate the creation of a well structured, minimal and hardened container image, called a rock. A Charmcraft profile can then be leveraged to add a software operator (charm) around the aforementioned container image.

Encapsulating the original 12-factor application in a charm allows your application to benefit from the entire charm ecosystem, meaning that the app can be connected to a database, e.g. an HA Postgres, observed through a Grafana based observability stack, add ingress and much more.

Documentation

Documentation for this project is located in a few places:

  1. This site: Documentation related to the product and development

  2. Rockcraft: Documentation related to the OCI image containers

  3. Charmcraft: Documentation related to the software operators (charms)

Contributing to this documentation

Documentation is an important part of this project, and we take the same open-source approach to the documentation as the code. As such, we welcome community contributions, suggestions and constructive feedback on our documentation. Our documentation is hosted on Read The Docs to enable easy collaboration. Please use the “Edit this page on GitHub” or “Give Feedback” links on each documentation page to either directly change something you see that’s wrong, ask a question, or make a suggestion about a potential change.

If there’s a particular area of documentation that you’d like to see that’s missing, please file a bug.

Project and community

12-Factor web support in Charmcraft and Rockcraft is a member of the Ubuntu family. This is an open source project that warmly welcomes community projects, contributions, suggestions, fixes and constructive feedback.

Thinking about using this solution in your next project? Get in touch!