KF 1.7: Investigate new features in 1.7

[Jose-Matsuda]

Determine what we will want to keep or remove

[mathis-marcotte]

Crud Web Apps Dashboard

Investigating crud web apps dashboard, there seems to be two main new features that we don't have on our end.
The first addition is that filtering was added for the notebook table. The filtering lets you filter the table based on the columns, with an information popup that can be displayed by hovering the question mark.

The second addition is a notebook details page that you can access by clicking on the notebook's name in the table. This notebook details page includes 4 tabs. The first tab "Overview" includes the general details on the notebook as well as a table of conditions (Ready, Initialized, PodScheduled, etc...). The second tab "Logs" displays the logs that comes from the notebook pod. The third tab "Events" shows the table of events for the notebook. The last tab "YAML" displays the YAML for the notebook or pod objects.

Both of these features seems like positives for the application. The filtering would probably only be useful for namespaces that have a lot of notebooks, which would also extend to our volume or kubecost table that might also have lots of entries. But it doesn't take much place on the page so for users that won't use it, it's not a hinderance.
And as for the notebook details page, that just seems like more info that users can see about their notebooks. They might not go in that page often, but it would probably be useful in cases where they are having problems and want to report an issue with more information about their notebook than what they previously could see. It is all information that we can personally find in kubernetes, but even for us it could save us some clicks while debugging.

[mathis-marcotte]

Crud Web Apps Form

Investigating the "New Notebook" form, there doesn't seem to be any new features that we would need to add. We would just need to make sure to not include inputs that we removed on our end.
The main updates seem to only be visual changes.

The "namespace" input got removed. That was a read-only input so removing it won't really cause errors. That information was a bit redundant as you can tell which namespace you are currently on with the namespace dropdown in the kubeflow header(doesn't appear when just running crud web apps locally, but that is fine).

The image section got visually updated and the buttons have an added description that describes what the image offers. Can definitely be useful information, but we don't share all the same images as upstream, so we would just need to determine the messages we should display.

What really changed is how the custom image section is displayed. The dropdown input displaying the exact image that is used when clicking on one of the big image buttons is now hidden behind a dropdown section. This is probably fine if most users use the ":v1" images. But this adds an extra click for users that want to change from for example "jupyterlab-cpu" to "jupyterlab-pytorch". And if users want to use a custom image not related to the images offered, that is hidden behind an additional dropdown "advanced options" section, with the "custom image" input being hidden until the "custom image" checkbox is checked. Personally, I don't like this change as I feel like it adds more clicks and hides info or functionality that might be pertient to some users. But, I would agree that when someone just wants a base notebook without anything custom, this change does simplify the frontend by removing extra inputs.

A small change to the CPU/RAM section is that "Requested CPU" and "CPU Limit" got renamed to "Minimum CPU" and "Maximum CPU" which could clarify these terms for users. Also, there is a helper text hover question mark that was added. We already had helper text directly written in the form above those inputs. So this is a change that we could consider implementing, but the way we currently have it is more consistent with the rest of our form(since we have a lot more helper text overall compared to upstream, and we have been writing it directly on the form instead of behind a hover icon).

The last change is that everything after the Volumes sections is now under a dropdown "advanced options" section. This does clean up the form a bit by hiding inputs that most users might not touch. But it does add an extra click to users that want to make a protected b notebook.

[mathis-marcotte]

Volume Web Apps

The volume table got the same updates as the notebooks table, so it also has filtering and a details page when clicking on the volume name.

The volume table also has a "New Volume" button. Although, for our case, not sure if we want that feature. I don't think users ever asked for something like this. This feature seems to have been there since the addition of the volume table in what looks like KF1.3,, so I personally don't know why we don't have that feature on our end, but the discussion on whether to keep this or not might have already happened.

Tensorboard Web Apps

Upstream also has a dashboard table for tensorboards, but this isn't a feature we support, so we can most likely just ignore that part of the Crud Web Apps component.

We also have our kubecost table that isn't on upstream that we should not forget to intergrate.

[mathis-marcotte]

Central Dashboard

Central dashboard does not seem to have any visible changes in the frontend, and the release notes reflect that. Just seems to include some bug fixes.