System idea: Graphical user interface

From the perspective of a single zone, the user interface is well defined. Each APPUiO Zone’s Kubernetes API is accessible through clients like kubectl or oc. A visual counterpart is the built-in OpenShift Web Console.

Domain models like organizations, teams (and their memberships), a users default organization or other entities are across all APPUiO Zones. Users of APPUiO Cloud should be able to manage that data centrally.

The graphical user interface for APPUiO Cloud features a web application with features outlined below. It is called "APPUiO Cloud Portal" and as per DNS naming scheme will be reachable under portal.appuio.cloud.

Those are rough ideas to help understand where this is going. It is not yet decided wich of the following features get implemented.

Core features

List of available zones

  • Link to OpenShift web console

  • Link to OpenShift logging

  • Link to OpenShift monitoring

  • API URL

  • Kubernetes version

  • OpenShift version

Reporting

Dashboard with:

  • Statistics (resource usage, objects, managed services)

  • Status information

  • Accumulated costs since last invoice

Billing

  • Credit management (pre paid)

  • Online payment (credit card, others)

  • Access to invoices

Organization management

  • Create new organization

  • Providing/revoking user access to the organization

  • Inviting users from other organizations

  • Manage teams and the users belonging to those teams

  • Assign roles to users and teams

  • A user’s default organization

System status

  • Status of zones (overal and individual subsystems)

  • Anouncements (maintenance windows, cluster upgrades)

Documentation

  • Link to the end user documentation

Optional features

Sign-up and registration

  • Choose user name

User management

  • password reset/change

  • email and name change

General thoughts

Themes and white-labels

In general, visual apearance of any graphical user interfaces shall be consistent across APPUiO Cloud. This includes:

  • APPUiO Marketing Website (homepage)

  • APPUiO IdP

  • OpenShift web console

  • Public documentation

  • Web console for cross zone concerns

Requirements

  • Ability to influence the visual apearance (theming)

  • Ability to change change the logo and key text elements like the brand or company name (white label)

  • Responsive design (desktop first)
    It’s assumed that a graphical user interface will most likely be consumed on desktop machines. However we also believe in accessibility also from mobile devices. We anticipate that certain items would be hard to display on mobile devices. In this case, we are fine with those items not being displayed on small screens. However, the essential functionalities must be available (graceful degradation).

  • No need for a mobile and or desktop application.

  • A command line client is a nice to have but is not mandatory.