juju status not being helpful when failing to provision

[Matthew Williams]

If I bootstrap a controller in aws then try to deploy a windows machine:

juju deploy juju deploy cs:~cloudbaseit/win2012r2/mssql-express-6 --series win2012rc2

The unit will stay in allocating, but according to the controller logs it's never going to work because of mistakes I've made:

2017-01-05 14:33:01 WARNING juju.provisioner provisioner_task.go:713 starting instance: no "win2012r2" images in eu-west-1 with arches [amd64]
2017-01-05 14:33:11 ERROR juju.provisioner provisioner_task.go:687 cannot start instance for machine "1": no "win2012r2" images in eu-west-1 with arches [amd64]

It would be nice if juju status showed that there was some problem I needed to look at, rather than just appear to be stuck in allocating.

In addition, when removing the application the machine is still listed in juju status until you run juju remove-machine

[Casey Marshall (cmars)]

This is a pretty serious UX issue, imo.

[Matthew Williams (mattyw)]

I've had a similar error when trying to deploy win2016 instances in azure:

The log reports

2017-01-05 16:51:00 WARNING juju.provisioner provisioner_task.go:713 starting instance: deploying win2016 not supported

but juju status just displays "allocating" and never changes

[Richard Harding (rharding)]

So in looking at this rc2 seems like a mistake. In checking the code the series for windows seem to be:

win2012hvr2|win2012hv|win2012|win2012r2|win8|win81|win7

So I think it told you what was correct.

Now I think that if you run juju status --format=yaml the machine output should show the privisioning error. Can you see if that's true?

[Anastasia (anastasia-macmood)]

From 2.1.x, I have tested with 2.1-rc2, 'juju status --format=yaml' surfaces provisioning errors.
It has been decided not to add this to tabular formatted output to avoid impacting readability due alignment unpredictability.

Marking this bug as 'Fix Committed' in 2.1.0.