How to well target units of a service and other points (production scope)

[Nicolas FOATA]

Hi juju community,

First of all, thanks for juju, I am playing with it (0.7 python version)
on an Amazon EC2 environment since nearly one week
and it's really interesting and easy to build a complete
and a complex platform (databases, front-ends, proxy servers, juju-gui,
...).

Nevertheless, I have some questions and some points
on which ones I would like some additionnal information if possible.
Indeed, I was faced with some problems.


1) Units inside a service

By example, when there is a big infrastruture of several webservers,
we often unexpose one by one the webservers, do the upgrade of teh unit,
test if
and put it back (expose it again).
But for doing this kind of thing here, this is not possible because if we
do an unexpose
the service is unexpose in its entirety.

Unless it is possible with juju to add some arguments to the command line,
 and so the unexpose hook knows that it has to unexpose only one part of
the VMs.

In another hand, we can solve this problems by creating severail webservers
with differents names
e.g : juju deploy webserver ws1
      juju deploy webserver ws2
      juju expose ws1
      juju expose ws2
      juju unexpose ws1
      # Do some stuff (upgrade, tests, etc.)
      juju expose ws1

But in that case, the webservers are seen as separate services and not as a
unique service.

At last,  I think, this is the same problem, if I want to activate more
information or more log
on a single unit and not the units containing into the service for
debugging, it doesn't seem to be possible.
Indeed, if I set a config parameter it is for all the units of the service
and not only the target unit.


2) Global parameters

Moreover, if I want to pass a global parameters to all the services or for
a subset of services,
it means that I have to put it into all the config.yaml file of Charm.
Consequently, if I have many variables, it will pollute my config
parameters and hide relevant ones.
But maybe, I missed something or it's not a good solution that I said and
it exists other ways to do it.

e.g: debug level on
       urls of repositories


3) Miscellaneous : Amazon EC2 tags and completion

At last, this is not really important, but I want to notify it.

When we create VMs on Amazon EC2 via the Amazon interface, it is possible
to add somme key=value data
such as name=nfoata-webserver and thus it's possible to retrieve easily
them (with Amazon GUI)
or for other stuff.
But, in the environement.yaml, there is no available parameters for these
key value attributes.

At last, a simple remark of lazy IT engineer, when we do juju deploy
<servicename> or juju status <servicename>,
it will be interesting to have some completion (for decreasing the muscular
effort made by the fingers)
for the juju keywords (deploy, remove-service, etc.) and charms or services
or units already known.
But in all cases, this lazy engineer (me) really like juju and its concepts.

;-)

Thanks in advance for your answers, for reading my english,
and have a good development for the go version

Best regards juju teams

Nicolas Foata
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