A pool groups the nodes you request under one name. Every node you run in ORC8R belongs to a pool, and every node in a pool shares the same setup: the same provider, the same size and resources, and the same apps. Pools live inside a project, and you create them with the request wizard.
Requesting a pool
You create a pool by requesting nodes. From the Nodes page click New Request (or Request first node). The wizard walks you through five steps:
- Select a project — choose which project the pool belongs to. You can create a project here if you need one.
- Choose apps — pick any apps to install on the nodes. This is optional; if you skip it, nodes start with just the agent. See Authoring apps.
- Where to run — choose a provider (the infrastructure the nodes run on). After you pick one, the wizard shows the settings that provider offers, such as CPU, memory, and operating system. Fill these in to describe the machine you want. This set of settings is called the spec. See Providers.
- Name your pool — give the pool a name using lowercase letters, numbers, and dashes (for example,
worker-pool-1). - Submit — review your choices and click Create Pool.
A live preview on the right shows the request being built as you go. After you submit, ORC8R starts creating the nodes and you are taken to your new pool.
Reading a pool
On the Nodes page each pool is shown as a card, and the Pools list shows them in a table with columns for Pool, State, Provider, Size, Nodes, and Created. The Nodes column shows how many nodes are online out of the total. Click into a pool to see its resource specification, its nodes, and (for some providers) its pool image.
Scaling a pool
Scaling means changing how many nodes a pool runs. For pools that ORC8R manages for you, you set the number you want and it adds or removes nodes to match.
- On the Nodes page, find the pool and click its Size badge.
- In the Resize dialog, use the + and − buttons, or type a number.
- Click Apply.
The dialog tells you how many nodes you have left within your organization's limit. Setting the size higher requests more nodes; setting it lower (including down to zero) removes nodes. If your organization's per-pool node limit is set to zero, adding nodes is disabled and an owner must raise the limit (see Organizations).
Self-hosted pools work differently: you add machines to them yourself rather than setting a size (see Providers).
Pool images and baking
Some providers create nodes from a pool image — a ready-made snapshot of a fully set-up machine, so every node in the pool starts identical and boots quickly. Building that snapshot is called baking.
Here is what happens, and what you see:
- ORC8R first starts a single builder node and installs the pool's chosen apps on it.
- While this runs, the builder node shows an orange dot and the state baking. On the pool's Requests page, the Bake column links to the builder's logs so you can watch progress.
- When it finishes, ORC8R captures the result as the pool image. The pool's Pool Image panel then shows the image reference, the version it was baked for, its size, and when it became ready.
- Every other node in the pool boots from that baked image, so they all come up the same way.
If a provider does not use pool images, you will not see a Pool Image panel, and nodes are set up individually instead.
Managing a pool
A pool card's menu lets you pause or clean up a pool. You can Block a pool to stop it, Activate it again, Reject it, or Fork it (start a new request pre-filled from this one). A pool can only be deleted once it has been rejected, and deleting is permanent.