Do gateway-only machines need to be added to topology.py?

[#1]

We give developers a "sandbox" VM: a machine that is added to the cluster with only Gateway roles so they'll have client configs deployed by CM but no services running. Every time we add a sandbox to the cluster, CM updates topology.py to add the sandbox. Then CM wants to restart/refresh all of the services that use topology.py.

This seems like it would be unnecessary since there are no services running on the sandboxes. Is there a way to exclude gateway-only machines from the topology so we can add gateways without being nagged to restart services?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

You're right that this is unnecessary. We've fixed this in our code branch slated for a future release.

Unfortunately, there's no great workaround right now. You could add gateways, deploy CC, then remove gateways, but that's far from ideal.