Machines
The Machines page helps you view and manage machines in the console.
What are Machines?
Machines are virtual servers hosted for you by cloud providers. Each machine is a compute instance you can use to run applications, host services, or manage workloads. The console gives you a single place to see and manage these instances across different clouds and accounts.
Machines are backed by provider-specific products. Depending on which cloud provider hosts one, a “machine” may correspond to:
- Akamai — Linodes ↗
- DigitalOcean — Droplets ↗
- AWS — EC2 instances ↗
These virtual servers are represented as provider-agnostic Machine resources, so you can work with them in the same way regardless of provider.
View Machine instances
The Machines table lists all machine instances from your registered cloud accounts, with their attributes displayed in table columns. Use pagination controls at the bottom of the page to navigate between pages if there are too many machines to display.
When table data is being updated, table rows are displayed in italic, and table controls become inactive. It may take time to load the next portion of data.
To refresh the table, use the Reload 🔄 button.
To customize attributes displayed in the table, use the Layout ⠇ button.
When there are too many machines available, use the Add filters 🔎 button to fine-tune your search. See the Resource Filter documentation for details.
Attributes
The following Machine attributes are available:
- ID — Provider-specific identifier
- Provider — Cloud provider (e.g. Akamai)
- Region — Region or data center where the machine runs
- Account — Account that owns the machine
- Machine type — Instance type/size (e.g. CPU and memory tier); provider-specific
- Name — Display name of the machine
- Status — Current state (e.g. running, stopped)
- Tags — Labels attached to the machine
- IPv4 / IPv6 — Network addresses
Which columns appear by default can vary; use the Layout button in the toolbar to show or hide columns.
Creating a new machine
To create a new machine instance, click Create in the toolbar. This action is disabled when the machine is associated with an account that does not have write access.
Storage
Storage configures the root disk and the volumes to attach to the machine.
A volume added here is attached as a raw device and left unmounted, which is why its Mount point starts empty.
Give a volume a mount point to have the kopernik.us agent mount it there once the machine is up. A mount point has
to be an absolute path other than /, which belongs to the root disk, must not contain spaces, and no two volumes
of one machine can share it. A mount point that breaks one of these rules is reported on the field and blocks the
creation until it is corrected.
An empty volume is formatted before its first mount, and one that already holds data is mounted as it is; see Block Storage Volumes for what each provider hands over.
Network access
Network access decides whether the machine holds a public address of its own, where the provider lets you choose:
- Public — the machine gets a public address and can be reached from the internet.
- Private — the machine gets no public address and talks over the VPC only.
Leaving it unset keeps the provider’s own default, which on AWS is whatever the subnet assigns. The control is shown only for a provider that can honor both values; where a provider always assigns a public address, there is nothing to choose and a request for a private machine is rejected rather than quietly ignored.
A subnet whose provider network rules out a public address is barred from the Subnet list while Public is
selected, and each subnet is listed with its own internet access; see
VPCs for what those values mean.
Deleting a machine
To delete a Machine, i.e. terminate the server instance, check the machine’s selection box and click the Delete 🗑️ button. This action is disabled when the machine is associated with an account that does not have write access.
The delete action may take time. Its status and progress are available on the Actions page.