We recently announced our new user interface and today we released an updated cloud experience, which was designed as part of the refresh process. The new cloud experience has a different focus than what we had before. We want to satisfy two types of users:
- Cloud operators are users that manage a cloud. They control an account on Amazon Web Services or an account on an Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, and want to provide access to their users to make use of resources in the cloud(s) they control.
- Cloud users are people that want to make use of cloud resources to run their workloads. This user would traditionally go to the IS department and make a hardware request to satisfy their needs.
The first step to try the new functionality is to register your cloud with Landscape.
The new user interface lets a cloud operator create resource groups, which are groups of related users, and to limit the number of instances a user can run at once. The system keeps track of how many instance hours each user uses and shows current capacity uses along with a graph to show usage history over time.
The user interface is split into two sections:
- The cloud section, shown at the top, provides a high-level view of activity in a cloud, including the capacity being used and a graph showing the usage over time. The ‘Settings’ tab provides tools to configure the registered cloud.
- The resource group section, shown below the cloud section, provides a view of activity in a resource group. Tabs provide access to tools to manage EC2 artefacts such as key pairs, security groups, elastic IPs, etc., and of course, to start and stop instances.
When a user has instances running they can be seen in the resource group they were started in.
When a cloud user is added to a resource group they receive an email invitation to join Landscape. Only cloud operators have access to the full functionality in the new user interface. Right now, cloud users can retrieve their credentials and the EC2 endpoint to use them with. They can use EC2-compatible tools such as euca2ools or ElasticFox to make use of the resources they have available to them. In the future, we’ll make the functionality in the new user interface available to cloud users, too.
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