As promised, below is a summary of the questions that were asked on the day.
Please do not hesitate to get in touch with me or any of our team if you have further questions.
“Is there a dark theme for primate” and “is there a concept of UI customisation”
The short answer is no, there are no “pre built” themes or customisations at Tech Preview. However, custom themes and other design changes will be much easier in the new UI as it is based on a widely available framework, Vue.JS
“does it do API discovery every time one logs in?”
Yes
“Is the primate GUI going to be built in to the underlying jetty service or will it be a separate project.”
It is a separate project that consumes the Cloudstack Rest API. Vue.JS can be served from most webservers. Many people are likely to want to exploit this to move the UI to a separate host, however it is also possible to serve it from the management server (for ease, this is the default configuration)
“Where are the comments stored? Are they part of the API or just a feature of primate?”
This is a question about the Cloudstack Comments feature, that lets users apply structured comments to entities in Cloudstack. This was functionality introduced in Cloudstack version 4.11 and is core functionality accessible on the API. The comments are stored (through the API) in the Cloudstack DB. This is not new in primate.
“Is it possible to perform “bulk actions in the new UI (start, stop, migrate, etc)
Yes. Ranges of instances, events and alerts (either contiguous or non-continuous) can be selected. Primate will then display actions that are possible to perform on a range of objects of that type (for example “View Console” is not available for a range of instances)
“The Dashboard; can I set thresholds so for colours?”
The colour-coded dashboard thresholds in primate work in exactly the same way as the thresholds in the existing UI (red at 80%) and are not configurable. This question was actually debated by the SIG during development (as custom thresholds is a feature that would be welcomed by many users). However, it requires some underlying changes to Cloudstack to drive the functionality and so would break the ethos of primate (certainly at GA) not introducing any new specific functionality itself. There are plans to introduce this at 4.15 or later, so it should hopefully be in Primate GA
If I have multiple management servers, can I install on a separate webserver and point this the load balanced IP?
Yes, absolutely. Primate is a separate component to Cloudstack and can be installed on any web server. A single line of configuration is then edited to “point” primate at a management server
Could you show the “Create New Zone” screen
Like the old UI. Primate has a “New Zone Wizard” – here’s some screenshots
Any dependencies / requirements before we plan an upgrade to the new UI
The release of primate that ships with Cloudstack 4.14 is Tech Preview only. It is suggested that you do not upgrade until GA. However, when doing so, there are no dependencies (other than a web server to run it on)
Any other corresponding changes other than the UI ie. Any relevant API changes etc
None – Primate simply consumes the existing API. There are some additions to the Cloudstack API in the 4.14 release, but these are driven by new features of 4.14 (and API compatibility will be maintained until the next major version of CloudStack)
Any documentation links that facilitate the use of the new UI (maybe a usage guide), in case the team is stuck with doing certain tasks from the new UI.
There is basic installation and configuration instructions at : https://github.com/apache/cloudstack-primate
At Tech Preview release, the Release Notes will contain further information on installation, system requirements, non-supported features,etc
User documentation will not be available until GA
It is worth noting that early feedback suggests that admins familiar with Cloudstack have expressed no problems using primate without consulting any documentation
