JUJU 1.0

A visual GUI for creating clouds

By Luca Paulina

Designing a gui

Juju enables developers to design and build cloud infrastructure faster than any other product on the market. It was originally developed as a command line interface (CLI) tool but early on Ubuntu decided to turn it into a visual graphical user interface (GUI). Since joining Ubuntu in January 2012 as Lead user experience designer on Juju it has been my task to create a fully functioning GUI. My first task was to refactor and redesign the GUI to align it with a new roadmap, it was successfully launched at the OpenStack Developer summit last year. The redesign took 3 months, in this time I oversaw the creation of a new Ubuntu cloud visual language which gave the GUI a new look and feel, refactored the UX and designed the new and very complex inspector. With the GUI launched I now work on new features, iterating it further and defining the roadmap.

See the GUI in action here

The Juju gui

Juju features a canvas which services can be placed upon, these services can then be linked together with relationship lines to build a cloud infrastructure. You can deploy pretty much anything from wordpress and MySQL to OpenStack.

What are these photos about?

The GUI offers a charm (Service) browser on the left and an interactive canvas on the right. Users can click on individual charms and add them to the canvas or simply drag them from the browser. Individual services can connect to other services to create cloud infrastructure.

What are these photos about?

juju gui inspector

The inspector allows users to quickly configure, manage and maintain the service once it has been deployed. Configuring a service at deployment is usually a complex task but I managed to streamline the process down to a few steps.

Notifications

What are these photos about?

Machine view

Machine view allows the user to explore their cloud infrastructure from a machine perspective. It exposes what machines are running and what services live on them in a simple finder style system. It was an incredibly tricky part of the GUI to design which went through many rounds of user testing and workshops with the technical leads of the project to finally settle on the direction and information shown.