Availability Zones

The concept of a zone, and examples of how they can be used, are provided in the Concepts and terms page. The current page covers how to use a zone. Specifically, it will show how to:

  • Add a zone
  • Edit a zone
  • Delete a zone
  • Assign a node to a zone
  • Allocate a node in a zone

All these actions require administrative privileges.

Add a zone

To create a zone, navigate to the 'AZs' page of the web UI and use the 'Add AZ' button. Simply enter a name for the zone and click 'Add AZ'.

add zone

Edit a zone

To edit a zone, on the 'AZs' page select a zone and use the 'Edit' button. Doing so will allow a change to be made to the name and a description for the zone added or edited.

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 node associations to the default zone.

Assign a node to a zone

To assign a node to a zone, from the 'Machines' page, select a node (or multiple nodes) 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 node's 'Configuration' page to change its zone.

Both ways are available in the API as well: edit an individual node through a PUT request to the node's URI, or set the zone on multiple nodes at once by calling the set_zone operation on the nodes endpoint.

Allocate a node in a zone

To deploy in a particular zone, call the acquire method in the region-controller API \<region-controller-api> as before, but pass the zone parameter with the name of the zone. The method will allocate a node in that zone, or fail with an HTTP 409 ("conflict") error if the zone has no nodes available that match your request.

Alternatively, you may want to request a node that is not in a particular zone, or one that is not in any of several zones. To do that, specify the not_in_zone parameter to acquire. This parameter takes a list of zone names; the allocated node will not be in any of them. Again, if that leaves no nodes available that match your request, the call will return a "conflict" error.

It is possible, though not usually useful, to combine the zone and not_in_zone parameters. If your choice for zone is also present in not_in_zone, no node will ever match your request. Or if it's not, then the not_in_zone values will not affect the result of the call at all.