[FFF]Ability to assign deployed MAAS nodes to a "group" or "project" would be helpful

[Nathaniel W. Turner]

Feature idea:

My typical use case for MAAS is to manage the lifecycle of test hardware for short to medium duration projects. Tests often include multiple nodes (in some cases 10 - 20 nodes per test).

Right now all nodes deployed for all my active projects are listed together in the MAAS UI. I have the node-project relationship information elsewhere, of course, but it would be nice to see it right in MAAS.

It might be helpful if there was a way to mark each allocated/deployed node as a member of a given group or project to facilitate better reporting. The idea is that the mark would then be automatically removed once the node was released. (So, a bit like tags, except only 1 group per node, and automatic removal on release. The former restriction would provide more flexibility to the UI when showing what group a node was in; some kind of tree-ish structure could be used, for example. Nodes could also be batch-moved into a group in the same way they can currently be assigned to a zone, etc.)

This ability would be useful on it's own, but also seems like it could integrate nicely with orchestration tools (the tool could assign a unique group to all nodes in a given charm or playbook deployment, for example).

It occurs to me that this could be partly accomplished using role accounts, where each project was a separate MAAS login. For some cases, that would probably be better, but for ephemeral projects, it would be awkward.
Tags could be used too, of course, but manually applying and removing tags for this purpose is a little awkward, and it would be easy to forget to remove tags for a project once it was done and the nodes were released.
But perhaps there is some other approach already implemented that I'm not aware of? Or maybe others can think of a better way to solve the problem of keeping large numbers of deployed nodes organized?

[Adam Collard (adam-collard)]

This bug has not seen any activity in the last 6 months, so it is being automatically closed.

If you are still experiencing this issue, please feel free to re-open.

MAAS Team