Want to start or stop a VM (Virtual Machine), or delete an offering in CloudStack? No big deal. However – what if you need to delete 20 offerings, or stop 20 VMs? Having to perform the same operation on each individual item is time-consuming, laborious and can be frustrating. Bearing this in mind, we’ve come up with a nice little enhancement to improve the user experience by making it possible to perform bulk operations via the UI.
Various views in the UI can already show checkboxes against items (such as VMs, events and alerts) making it easier for users to perform common operations on multiple items. In the next LTS release (Q3/4 2021), we’ve amped it up a notch. Not only have we extended the support for additional items, we have also added a progress view window to keep track of the status of the operations in flight.
With this enhancement, you can perform bulk actions on the following resources/operations:
- VM: start, stop, restart, destroy
- Kubernetes: start, stop, destroy
- Instance groups: delete
- SSH keypair: delete
- Affinity groups: delete
- Volumes: destroy
- Snapshots: delete
- VM snapshots: delete
- Networks: restart, delete
- VPC: restart, delete
- Public IP Addresses: delete
- VPN customer gateway and VPN users: delete
- Firewall, port forwarding, LB rules: delete
- Template and ISOs: delete (In the zone tab)
- Events and Alerts: archive, delete
- Projects: active, suspend, delete
- Accounts: enable, disable, lock, delete
- System VMs and Virtual Routers: stop, start, reboot and destroy
- Internal LB: stop, start
- Compute, system, disk and backup offerings: delete
- Network and VPC offerings: enable, disable, delete
If an item supports bulk actions, it will have a checkbox as the first column in the list view. Checking this box will display the supported bulk operations available for that item. On clicking the button to perform the action (eg. start operation on VMs) it will display a pop-up window listing the resources that you have selected for validation.
Upon clicking OK, the operation begins, and the window will transition to the progress view.
In the bulk action dialog boxes, we’ve reversed the colours of the ‘Cancel’ and ‘OK’ buttons, to reduce the risk of performing bulk operations (like delete) on resources that you didn’t intend to. We’ve also added an eye-catching alert message for operations that can be categorized as destructive in nature, such as delete or power off.
When the progress dialog box is open the usual notifications that appear at the top right corner of the screen are suppressed. This is as we can see the status of the operation in the current window. However, the notification list will still be populated so users can understand the reason for any individual failures. We’ve also added a filter button to the Operation Status column which is useful when there are many resources, and you want to filter resources in a particular state (In Progress, Success, Failed).
Another cool addition to the user experience – we’ve added links to the notifications of failed operations or tasks. So, now you can just click on the highlighted name, and it’ll take you to the corresponding resource’s info/details view.
These enhancements to the UI will be available in the 2021 Q3/4 release of Apache CloudStack. Hope you’ll like it!
Pearl is a quality and technology driven software engineer, with 5 years’ experience with relevant expertise in providing solutions to the telecom and software industry. Pearl has an excellent grasp of the evolving technologies in the changing telecom space. She is a go-getter, with a flair for learning new technologies. Pearl is based in Bangalore, India. Self-learning and self-motivation are the mantras that she follows to keep herself abreast with new things in her field of work.
