Basic User Interface

[nstogner]

Substratus users would benefit from some sort of visual representation of the state of the system.

Basic features:

• List (with ready status) of: Datasets, Models, Servers, Notebooks

Near term features:

• View details on listable objects
• Launch Notebook

Longer term features:

• Graph representations of Model lineage
• Real time representations of running processes (container build jobs, training jobs, etc)

Implementations Options

Note: Not necessarily an either/or decsion.

A. Kubectl Extension

• Launches a localhost HTTP server
• Opens browser to that server

Pros:

• No networkings/tls administrative setup, just need kubeconfig

Cons:

• How would link sharing work?

B. VSCode Plugin

• Webview for complex visuals
• Treeview might work for lists?

C. Streamlit App

• https://docs.streamlit.io/knowledge-base/using-streamlit/how-do-i-run-my-streamlit-script

D. Jupyter Notebook Web App

• ?

[brandonjbjelland]

We're thinking along the same lines on the vscode plugin. Namely, the tree view for lists of resources grouped by kind. wrt Webview: I'm a little more wary of it but think it's a viable escape hatch if we really can't present the data through the other facilities in the way we want. Any elements we render can render within the standard containers will just look and feel better out of the box. Of course if what we want to show doesn't fit within the constraints, we have few other options.

Looking at web UIs, our kubeflow friends do pretty well. Looking at the codebase, it's an angular app.

A web-based UI is certainly something we need from a product perspective. Unsure how familiar you are with the space but a couple options if we're building that from scratch:

1. NextJs - it's small, relatively easy to get going, and has a huge userbase. It provides a lot of structure always React needed but never set out to deliver.
2. svelte and svelte-kit seems to be well-loved by many. I don't know it but most everything in the front-end world looks similar.

If we saw unique value prop in having a mobile app, I'd suggest flutter as the best cross-platform (web, ios, android) toolkit/framework available today (I've built mobile/web apps with it). On one hand I think it'd be cool if more tools shipped native mobile apps and had a great native-feeling experience there. On the other hand, I'm happy to confine my software work to a proper workstation. I very much lean toward nextjs in the webapp space.

[samos123]

I like NextJS personally and is what I've standardized on for Frontends for personal projects. It would also be helpful to have NextJS app so we can take that into a SaaS version more easily later.