Deployments

Deployments allow you to group different types of containers and virtual machines into a single logical unit. A deployment consists of:

  • A collection of cloud-config files that define each instance type.
  • The actual running instances deployed from those configs.

Creating Your First Deployment

Prerequisites

You must have at least one cloud-config file before creating a deployment. See the Cloud-Config documentation for details.

Create a Deployment

  1. Navigate to the Deployments section in your LXDMosaic instance.
  2. Click Create and give the deployment a name, e.g., My_Site.
  3. Add the cloud-configs that belong to this deployment. For example, you might have created:
  • Webservers/My_Site — An Apache/Nginx server hosting your website.
  • Mysql/My_Site — A MySQL database for your application.
  1. Click Create. The page will reload showing your deployment with active resource usage and container counts.

Deploy Instances

Select your deployment from the sidebar. You will see:

  • A row of action buttons.
  • The cloud-configs and their deployed container instances.

Click Deploy Containers to provision new instances. Each cloud-config in the deployment appears as an option. You can specify:

  • How many instances of each type to create.
  • Which host(s) to deploy them on.

Typical considerations:

  • Include your default profile as an "extra profile" if needed.
  • Verify the instances are running correctly after deployment.

Start Deployment

Once all instances are deployed, click Start Deployment to start every instance in the deployment at once.

Currently, it is your responsibility to verify that cloud-init instructions were applied successfully to each container. Capturing cloud-init results via the phone_home mechanism does not work reliably with self-signed certificates. This is on the todo list.

It is also your responsibility to configure traffic routing (e.g., load balancing, firewalls) for these instances. There are plans to integrate gobetween as a built-in load balancer in the future.

Stop Deployment

Stops all instances linked to this deployment. Cloud-config definitions are preserved so you can restart later.

Delete Deployment

This action is destructive. Deleting a deployment removes:

  • All running containers/virtual machines that are part of the deployment.
  • The deployment configuration itself.

Use this carefully.