Sharing some news from @anthonydillon and @nottrobin from the Canonical Web + Design team. In two recent updates on the Ubuntu blog, they’ve shared progress on two projects that impact Juju/JAAS users:
JAAS dashboard
The Juju GUI is being overhauled to become the JAAS dashboard. It will focus on providing a high level view over the whole model, rather than providing fine-grained control over machines and applications. Instead, you will be able to quickly drop into a Juju shell and execute commands via the “command line”.
These images come from posts that the Web + Design team have posted to the Ubuntu blog. You’re welcome to read all the details by clicking through:
Code repositories
These projects are open source software. You’re welcome to contribute! Here are the links. I’ve also tagged some of the primary people working on the code if you would like to put a “face” to the name.
I also look forward to getting some insight in how the charm QA process could start evolving, involving the community in that process and start improving the store over all quality.
Grow slow here as I agree with the concept of having the community weed out the best charms rather than full out pay-to-promte.
So does that mean you won’t be able to configure charms from the UI? That seems like a bit of a downgrade in my opinion. I can understand it not being a first-pass feature or something like that, but is seems like that is a good part of the advantage of Juju GUI: being able to simplify deployment and management for operators, partly by not making them necessarily need the commandline.
I’d be interested to hear more about how you use the GUI and charm configuration specifically.
What method do you use to deploy charms and bundles (CLI/GUI)?
Do you primarily deploy bundles or individual charms?
How often do you modify charm configurations during deployment? After deployment?
How often do you scale applications? What method do you use (CLI/GUI)?
How many active models do you have?
Feel free to send me a message if you don’t feel comfortable replying here.
If I’m being honest, I haven’t used it a lot yet. I’m still getting my charms written before I deploy and start using them.
I used to use a container deployment tool, Rancher, which had a comprehensive GUI that, even though I am extremely fluent on the commandline, was still appreciated for its ability allow me to control the cluster through the interface.
It may not be a concern with Juju as much, and it may not actually represent a problem, my first thought is just that it seemed like a reduction of a good feature.
The fact that you are asking me those great questions about how I use it, though, is a good sign to me that you are approaching the problem while trying to take actual use into account!
Hello everyone!
We publish the blog post updates at the end of our 2-week-iterations, so it’s a regular way to keep track of what is going (front-end and design wise) on across all our products and websites in general.
@zicklag would be great to organise some user testing and interview with you, would you be available for a 30/45 chat with us?
The team explored visual alternatives for some components of the JAAS dashboard UI after the user testing sessions. We are planning to continue this task with gorilla testing these explorations.
Developed and released the juju project website
The team rolled out a new website for Juju: juju.is as part of a bigger renovation planned for JAAS and Juju. Relevant docs and tutorials are also on juju.is now.
JAAS dashboard
The work on the JAAS dashboard continues, and the team is implementing the possibility of resizing the Juju shell for a better experience. The feature to filter apps/units/machines by status in the model detail page view is also going to be available soon.
We could open a new thread here on Discourse every iteration if you are interested in Front-end and design updates on Juju, JAAS and CharmHub.
Another round of updates on the work the Web and Design team did in the past iteration:
JAAS
JAAS.ai
The team started working on the strategy for the new content for jaas.ai. After the release of juju.is, the website dedicated to the Juju project, and the release of the new JAAS dashboard, the content and marketing pages of jaas.ai need to be updated.
The team is working with product managers and engineering team to organise and create the new content.
JAAS dashboard
The team is continuing to work on the implementation of new features in the JAAS dashboard. For this iteration we completed:
Topology Integration
The integration of the model topology is completed in its first iteration, the responsive bug that was affecting the topology on smaller screens is now fixed and will be released live soon.
User testing for grouping and filtering
As a follow up from previous user testing, some other quick Guerrilla testings were done to see if users can perform grouping and filtering tasks using existing components on the top bar. New findings and suggestions will be discussed to further refine the design of JAAS dashboard as well as Vanilla React components.
And the whole blog post here:
Also, welcome to the JAAS squad, @ziheliu214 (UX designer)!
You can read her introduction at the top of the blog post.
All of this is becoming a joint issue with the charms moving to the snap ecosystem. Basically there’s discussions and work to take place but it’s all after charms join that ecosystem and will have parity among the two going forward.
I know @hatch is working on getting it going with the Jimm updates that go with the Juju updates in 2.8. I’m not sure where that test-ability is at yet. I’ll let him help guide that.
