New User Interface

Posted on April 15, 2010 by Tony Lucas

As part of the release of FlexiScale 2.0 we have developed a brand new user interface. In this post I’m going to briefly take you through the key parts of it. I’ll be following up in a lot more detail in subsequent posts.

FlexiScale 2.0 in Action

You’ll quickly notice it’s nothing like the old interface. I think we can all agree that is probably a good thing!

The really neat thing about the UI though is that apart from the billing section, it’s completely built using our own public API, so any interaction you can do through the UI, you could also integrate directly with your own systems if required.

Tabs

No, I’m not talking about our Operations Manager (Tabs Sharif for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting him yet), I’m talking about the different tabs across the top of the screen.

There are a number of key tabs in the interface, one for each of the main types of resource that FlexiScale manages. You can use each tab to manage and manipulate that reasource to your hearts content.

The key one to explain here is the first one: VDCs, short for Virtual Data Centres,  this enables you conveniently to group all your resources together in easy to manage locations.  For example you could have Development, Staging & Live VDCs, all easily manageable from within the same interface.  This allows you to logically separate different resources for your convenience.

The next tabs are each related to particular types of resource:

• Servers
• Disks
• Snapshots
• Images
• Networks

Each tab allows you to dive right in to add, delete or modify the appropriate resource, allowing you incredible flexibility and speed in building and reconfiguring your set up. I will be covering each of these in more depth in blog posts over the next few days.  If you are curious to find out more before then, feel free to Signup!

Next comes the jobs tab. This is simply a log of the actions you have asked the system to perform (starting, stopping servers etc.)

Last but not least, there is the dashboard. At the moment the Dashboard is fairly basic from give you an overview of your servers, and the amount of credit you have remaining. So why is it there might you ask? As we continue to push releases out (and they will be coming out thick and fast now), this will be updated to give you all sorts of additional functionality and reporting services. On that note we’d love to know what you would like it to show, as the more feedback we get the better.

Settings

The settings pane allows you to change your contact details and your password. It also allows you to cancel your account (not that you would ever want to do that).

Billing

The billing pane shows you how your units have been used, and allows you to buy more units. If you’ve purchased an “auto-topup” package of units (one that automatically charges your credit card when your units balance gets low), you can cancel that facility here. You can also retrieve copies of your invoices from here.

Support

Click on here to get access to our new integrated ticket system.

We want your feedback

Let us know what you think of the new UI. Love it, hate it, or even prefer the old one (we can recommend a good medical practitioner)? Whatever the case, we’d love to know.

Until next time…..

Tony @tonylucas on Twitter