juju ssh to some unit

[Andrea Ieri]

It happens countless times during normal cloud operations that I need to ssh to a unit, but don't really care which unit I'm going to end up into. This happens particularly often (as an example) with ceph-mon and hacluster applications (since cluster commands can be run from any unit), but can also occur with single-unit applications: in either case I have to first run juju status to figure our the unit IDs, and only then I can juju ssh to the unit I have (randomly) chosen.

As a way to improve the user experience for operators I propose having `juju ssh <application>` make you land on a random unit; logging into the leader could be accomplished with `juju ssh <application>/leader` in order to align with the `juju run` semantics.

Also note the somewhat related bug 1313862.

[Pen Gale (pengale)]

This one is a little worrying to me from a new user’s perspective. If I haven’t yet grokked the relationship between applications and units, landing on a random unit in an application might be confusing.

I’d support a syntax like `juju ssh application/any`.

I do love the /leader idea!

[Simon Richardson (simonrichardson)]

I would suggest you could write a juju plugin for this. Juju has a powerful, yet simple plugin system that allows you to do this[1]

So you could do `juju jump-to <application>`.

1. https://juju.is/docs/juju-plugins

[Achilleas Anagnostopoulos (achilleasa)]

The <application>/leader syntax is indeed interesting but it also comes with a potential usability caveat. An operator may ssh into the leader unit and then perform a sequence of actions (e.g. start tailing files etc.). However, the leadership might change while they are still logged in but without them knowing about this unless they also monitor the unit statuses. This might cause confusion (e.g. why did the leader unit stop writing to the file?)

[Canonical Juju QA Bot (juju-qa-bot)]

This bug has not been updated in 2 years, so we're marking it Low importance. If you believe this is incorrect, please update the importance.