Beta Launch of New Control Panel

I’m really excited to announce the availability of our brand new customer control panel app! We’re calling it a “beta” launch, although it’s pretty much fully-functional and we’ve been using it internally for a while now. We’ll be running both our old and new control panel apps alongside each other for a while.

The new control panel app has been quite some time in the making (although I’m not sure I want to say quite how long!).

Here are some highlights:

• Faster loading and navigating around the app
• Clearer navigation and layout
• Extended Orbit object storage integration
• Simpler and improved new resource creation pages
• Easier to view related resources e.g. which groups a Cloud Server belongs to
• Clearer account and billing pages
• Simpler management of firewall rules and groups
• Improved support for users with multiple accounts

Behind the scenes

Our old Brightbox Manager app, being around 8 years old, was an awkward mix of Rails and very early Backbone.js which over time become harder and harder to maintain and thus we ended up needing a “Big Rewrite”.

The new control panel app uses React with Redux and interacts with our REST API, GraphQL and Websockets event stream directly from the browser. We’ve also made use of PostCSS and TailwindCSS with a BEMIT-like approach to maintainable HTML/CSS.

What’s next?

We’ll be running the new Control Panel alongside the older Brightbox Manager for a while as we update documentation and continue to make improvements.

Here’s just a taste of some of the items on the roadmap:

• Improvements to responsive design to support smaller screens
• Container Registry integration
• “Drag and drop” object uploading to Orbit storage containers
• Global search functionality
• Actions on multiple item selection
• Improved activity feed display
• Config maps integration

Give it a try!

If you’re an existing customer you can start using the new control panel right away, by logging in at the new URL: https://cloud.brightbox.com

We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions, so do let us know how you get on.

If you’re not yet a customer, you can sign up in 2 minutes and get a £50 credit to kick the tyres.