Am I stupid or is the CycleCloud QuickStart completely wrong?

Question

Hi,

CycleCloud looks fantastic, but I've been going out of my mind trying to follow the seemingly simple instructions for installing it on my Azure subscription. Either there seem to be some gross deficiencies in its documentation, or I am missing something completely obvious.

There are a lot of good instructions and videos, etc, about creating a cluster, but I can't even get to the part where I set up a cluster because the installation process simply doesn't work. I figured out the Managed Identities part, which is not obvious - the Contributor role does not work and you have to either use the custom settings (which I can't do with my subscription, I think) in this document (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cyclecloud/how-to/managed-identities?view=cyclecloud-8) or use an Owner role.

But then once I go to my CycleCloud VM and try to create a subscription, 19 times out of 20 I get stuck in the "Add Subscription" page because the "Default Location" setting which is required simply does not work. Occasionally after clicking randomly and threatening to throw the computer out the window, I get a dropdown list of locations, but generally it just sits there smirking at me. "Error: undefined". "This field is not valid". OMG!!!!!

Finally, after creating and recreating the VM a few times, it seems that either the planets weren't properly aligned, or I didn't create a powerful enough VM to run CycleCloud, because it finally started working. But then there's another, seemingly insurmountable problem in your documentation, on this page: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cyclecloud/tutorials/create-cluster?view=cyclecloud-8

Under Networking, select the subnet to use for the compute infrastructure. Use the default subnet you created in the quickstart, then click Next.

No!!! I did not create a default subnet in the quickstart! Nowhere did it give me an option to create one and there is no mention on the quickstart page of creating one: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cyclecloud/qs-install-marketplace?view=cyclecloud-8

No matter what I put in the "Subnet ID" field, it tells me the value is not valid. I tried the virtual network ID, the subnet ID, the subnet name, etc - nothing works. And the dropdown menu doesn't show anything.

Really, am I just that dense? Am I missing something completely obvious, or is your documentation totally useless?

Answer 1

@David Huggins-Daines

Firstly, apologies for the delay in responding here and sorry for the trouble and any inconvenience this issue may have caused.

I checked with the product team on this issue, and can confirm that you need to wait some time for the Azure subnets to be detected by CycleCloud. But they appear on their own after a while.
The delay could be as it is getting a lot of the metadata. However, the problem is it doesn't surface errors very well, nor progress that are visible to the end user.

The subnet and location dropdowns support typing as a means of filtering the list, but not putting in your own values. Those values are populated in the background after CycleCloud is installed, and periodically. It is usually a fast process to get them, but it could take longer.

I have shared this feedback to the product team to improve the documentation to call out this.
However, if you need to know the exact root cause of the delay, Support team will be able to check and help on this. I would recommend you to open a azure support case.