We are happy to announce the release of our new open source product Cloudstack-UI that provides
Apache CloudStack users with enhanced user-friendly interface.
Cloudstack-UI is our in-house open-source product first released in the April, 2017. It enables IaaS, PaaS providers, system integrators and other solution providers using ACS as a part of their products to give their end users modern, easy to interact with cloud management UI developed with up-to-date technological stack (Angular 2, Typescript, MDL). We consider it especially suitable solution for the companies that plan to launch public AWS-style cloud for IaaS or PaaS products. Most of average Apache CloudStack users struggle to get things quickly done if they haven’t read tons of tutorials and how-tos because native Apache CloudStack interface is purposed for skilled system administrators and DevOps whose day to day VM management routine enables to remember ACS UI structure. This leads to endless questions, help desk tickets, tasks delays and affects the productivity and safety of operations when providing ACS clouds to end users. To deal with such problems, some ACS adopters, for example Exoscale, decide to craft customized UI allowing users easily work with their PaaS product.
We developed the Cloudstack-UI taking into account needs of users, who wish to effectively operate ACS without getting into much pain with complex structure and behavior of its’ native interface. The product is designed to deliver high-quality UX for ACS basic zones and is easy to use for anyone who have worked with well known public cloud services. Here are some of the Cloudstack-UI features:
- Fast and intuitively right operations thanks to straightforward SPA interface and sophisticated client application which discovers and tackles all kind of situations without even communication with server.
- Developed with mobile first approach for easy cross-platform use.
- Change of the browser or device doesn’t affect user settings - we use ACS tags to remember user preferences, settings, UI state, theme
- Customization of the UI color theme and branding - engage your users in a better way thanks to customisation options
- Remembers navigation and allows to share links of the current position in the app
- Supports additional search, filter, grouping functionality which is handled by client
- Includes preconfigured customizable Security Group templates to enhance fast and secure creation of VM
- Ability to add editable VM details such as descriptions, groups, colors and group/filter VMs based on these parameters
- Advanced logs filtering and search by date, category, keywords.
- Single screen VM creation with immediate error diagnosis and ability to fix and recreate VM
- Enhancements in volume snapshot functionality
- Integrated resource usage bar that always displays how much is used and spare to help users avoid capacity errors other useful enhancements of basic functionality
The most amazing thing about the project is its free open source nature. We are ready to share our experience with new adopters and committers and hear what community expects from the project. In the future we aim to enlarge covered functionality and support more helpful features for advanced ACS users. You can learn more about the product and our plans here.