Azure: No availability zone set?

[Haw Loeung]

Hi,

When deploying VMs in Azure, there doesn't appear to be any availability zone information.

Juju status:

| Model Controller Cloud/Region Version SLA Timestamp
| mymodel-eastus-staging mycontroller-controller-us azure/eastus 2.9.32 unsupported 23:56:47Z
| ...
| Machine State DNS Inst id Series AZ Message
| 0 started 52.146.31.10 machine-0 focal
| 1 started 20.62.184.193 machine-1 focal
| 2 started 20.62.184.178 machine-2 focal

Even within the VM, there's no "JUJU_AVAILABILITY_ZONE". I mean, it's there, but empty.

Can we get that fixed to show the AZ? Maybe there's no concept of AZ within Azure, so instead can we get it to show the "location" / region name?

From within the VM, that looks available too:

| $ curl -H "Metadata:true" "http://169.254.169.254/metadata/instance/compute?api-version=2017-12-01"; echo
| {"location":"eastus","name":"machine-0","offer":"0001-com-ubuntu-server-focal", ... "vmSize":"Standard_D3_v2","zone":""}

Is that because of zone being "" above?

[Ian Booth (wallyworld)]

The Azure provider uses availability sets which originally all that was available when the Azure provider was first developed several years ago.

There's now scale sets which can include availability zones, but we don't support that at the moment. Hence right now, for Azure, the AZ will always be "".

[Vitaly Antonenko (anvial)]

This sounds more like feature requests. We need to discuss adding it to the next cycle roadmap.

[Haw Loeung (hloeung)]

Is this a feature request? The other clouds have this information present in Juju status output as well as the JUJU_AVAILABILITY_ZONE environment variable.

[John A Meinel (jameinel)]

So the original implementation on Azure didn't have zones. They had a different concept called Availability Sets, which was more the inverse (everything within one Availability Set would not be taken out simultaneously, vs everything in one Availability Zone goes down in the zone goes down).

Which meant that the original tracking definitely didn't want to pass the Set down as a Zone. However, I do believe with newer ARM logic on Azure (and within Juju) we did switch to a Zone based model, but it seems while the provisioner knows about it, we didn't actually add tracking for it.

Because of a different history for how Azure tracks this information, it is quite a bit more of an issue to start passing it through.

[John A Meinel (jameinel)]

Note that we'll do a quick audit to see if the information is easily accessible, or whether it requires deep modeling changes.