We’ve updated our status page to show whether launching in a region is disabled, or a region is disabled entirely.
We realised that getting a “launching is disabled in this region” message after trying to launch an instance was annoying, so hopefully visiting https://bryn.climb.ac.uk/status before you start launching an instance will help you chose where to launch it.
There are three different statuses that can be displayed (or not) underneath the name of each region:
1. No status
The region is open, launch an instance!
2. Launching new instances disabled
Generally speaking, this means that the provision-able capacity of the site has been reached and there is no space for new instances to be created. Disabling launching in a region is a manual process for us, and we enact it when new instances will immediately reach an “Error” state because there isn’t any space on the underlying servers to fit the new instance. We only disable launching in a region if we physically cannot fit any more instances on there, and we try our best to shuffle things around to generate space - it surprises us how elastic CLIMB is sometimes!
The in-use vs total vCPU count of a region is deceptive, as not all of this space is allocated for standard instances. For example, Cardiff has several servers dedicated to teaching, and all sites have large-RAM-to-vCPU-ratio servers that are counted in the overall vCPU count, but can only be accessed by request and not by standard Bryn launching.
3. Region disabled
This blocks Bryn from interacting with the region completely. Either something is critically wrong with a region or we’ve shut a region down for maintenance. We try our best to get in contact with everyone that might be affected by planned maintenance, but please check https://discourse.climb.ac.uk for updates.
