Availability zones (deb/2.7/UI)

An availability zone is an organisational unit containing nodes, where each node is in exactly one zone. While in production, a machine can be allocated from a specific zone. Availability zones can be used for fault-tolerance, service performance, and power management. See Zone examples for more details.

A newly installed MAAS comes with a default zone which initially contains all nodes. You cannot remove the ‘default’ zone or change its name, but you can create new zones and assign machine to them. You can safely ignore this article if you’re not interested in leveraging zones.

Six questions you may have:

  1. How do I list availability zones?
  2. How do I add an availability zone?
  3. How do I edit an existing availability zone?
  4. How do I delete an existing availability zone?
  5. How do I assign a machine to an availability zone?
  6. How do I allocate a machine in a particular zone?

List availabilty zones

To see a list of availability zones, choose “AZs” from the top menu:

Add a zone

To create a zone, navigate to the ‘AZs’ page of the web UI and use the ‘Add AZ’ button. Enter a name for the zone and click ‘Add AZ’.

Edit a zone

To edit a zone, on the ‘AZs’ page, select a zone and use the ‘Edit’ button:

This selection allows you to change the name and description for the added (or edited) zone:

Delete a zone

To delete a zone, on the ‘AZs’ page, select a zone and use the ‘Delete AZ’ button. Doing so will also move any potential machine associations to the default zone.

Assign a machine to a zone

To assign a machine to a zone, from the ‘Machines’ page, select a machine (or multiple machines) and choose ‘Set zone’ using the ‘Take action’ button:

After selecting a zone hit the ‘Set zone…’ button to apply the change.

You can also edit a machine’s ‘Configuration’ page to change its zone.