The Manual cloud and Juju

List of supported clouds > Manual

This document describes details specific to using the Manual (manual) cloud with Juju.

The Manual (manual) cloud is a cloud you create with Juju from existing machines.

The purpose of the Manual cloud is to cater to the situation where you have machines (of any nature) at your disposal and you want to create a backing cloud out of them.

If this collection of machines is composed solely of bare metal you might opt for a MAAS cloud. However, recall that such machines would also require IPMI hardware and a MAAS infrastructure. In contrast, the Manual cloud can make use of a collection of disparate hardware as well as of machines of varying natures (bare metal or virtual), all without any extra overhead/infrastructure.

When using the Manual cloud with Juju, it is important to keep in mind that it is a (1) machine cloud and (2) not some other cloud.

See more: Cloud differences in Juju

As the differences related to (1) are already documented generically in our Tutorial, How-to guides, and Reference docs, here we record just those that follow from (2).

Juju points of variation Notes for the Manual cloud
setup (chronological order):
CLOUD
supported versions: N/A
requirements: - At least two pre-existing machines (one for the controller and one where charms will be deployed).
- The machines must be running on Ubuntu or CentOS.
- The machines must be accessible over SSH with ~/.local/share/juju/ssh/juju_id_rsa.pub using a user account with root privileges.

(On Ubuntu, sudo rights will suffice if this provides root access. If a password is required for sudo, juju will ask for it on the command line. On CentOS, a root user can install SSH by running yum install sudo openssh-server redhat-lsb-core; systemctl start sshd. Since you will be connecting to the root account during the add-machine step, also ensure that there is a root password set on the CentOS machine.)

- The machines must be able to ping one another.
definition: Cloud type: manual. You will need to supply a name you wish to call your cloud and the ssh connection string for the controller, the username@, or the .
CREDENTIAL
definition: Credentials should already have been set up via SSH. Nothing to do!
CONTROLLER
notes on bootstrap: The machine that will be allocated to run the controller on is the one specified during the add-cloud step.
other (alphabetical order:)
CONFIGURATION (model)
cloud-specific: N/A
CONSTRAINT
conflicting:
supported?
- allocate-public-id :x:
- arch :white_check_mark:
Valid values: For controller: [host arch]. For other machines: arch from machine hardware.
- container :white_check_mark:
- cores :white_check_mark:
- cpu-power :x:
- image-id :x:
- instance-role :x:
- instance-type :x:
- mem :white_check_mark:
- root-disk :white_check_mark:
- root-disk-source :x:
- spaces :x:
- tags :x:
- virt-type :x:
- zones :white_check_mark:
PLACEMENT DIRECTIVE
<machine> TBA
subnet=... :x:
system-id=... :x:
zone=... TBA
MACHINE With any other cloud, the Juju client can trigger the creation of a backing machine (e.g. a cloud instance) as they become necessary. In addition, the client can also cause charmed operators to be deployed automatically onto those newly-created machines. However, with a Manual cloud the machines must pre-exist and they must also be specifically targeted during charmed operator deployment.

(Note: A MAAS cloud must also have pre-existing backing machines. However, Juju, by default, can deploy charmed operators onto those machines, or add a machine to its pool of managed machines, without any extra effort.)

Machines must be added manually, unless they are LXD. Example:

juju add-machine ssh:bob@10.55.60.93
juju add-machine lxd -n 2

Further notes:
- Juju machines are always managed on a per-model basis. With a Manual cloud the add-machine process will need to be repeated if the model hosting those machines is destroyed.
- To improve the performance of provisioning newly-added machines consider running an APT proxy or an APT mirror. See more: Offline mode strategies.
RESOURCE (cloud)

Consistent naming, tagging, and the ability to add user-controlled tags to created instances.

 N/A

Contributors: @swalladge , @whershberger

Last updated 3 days ago.

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