Host groups
Put hosts in groups such as production, staging or customer-x, then give permissions, schedules, runbooks and auto-update policies to a whole group.
A group is a word you give to hosts: production, staging, customer-x. A host can be in several groups. What you set on a group applies to every host in it, including the ones you add to it later.
Set a host's groups on the Hosts page, with the Groups button of its row. The Groups column shows them and filters the list.
Group names use lowercase letters, digits, dots, dashes and underscores, up to 40 characters.
What a group is for
| Where | What it does |
|---|---|
| Teams and permissions | A grant with the scope Host group gives its level on every host in the group. |
| Auto-update | Auto-update → Host groups sets the default mode of every container and deployment on the group's hosts that has no policy of its own. |
| Schedules | The target Host group starts, stops or restarts every container on its hosts, for example to stop staging at night. |
| Runbooks | A step on Group · name runs on the service of that name on every host in the group. |
| Inventory | Workloads → More → Export inventory includes each host's groups. |
Kowan's own containers
Kowan's server, agents and helpers are never stopped by a group schedule (stopping an agent would cut its host off) and never updated by a group's auto-update policy: they update through Settings → Server updates.
A group schedule also skips containers labelled kowan.schedule.group: "off", and start wakes only the containers meant to run (restart policy always or unless-stopped), not one-off jobs.