Boosting OpenYurt Usability: UI/CLI SIG Roadmap and Upcoming Features

Background

OpenYurt is an intelligent edge‑computing platform built on cloud‑native technologies with a zero‑intrusion design. It integrates cloud, edge, and device capabilities for large‑scale edge workloads. Recent releases (1.1, 1.2, 1.3) added OTA upgrade support, enhanced node‑pool governance, and consolidated most controllers into the yurt‑manager component, but the platform still has a high usability barrier.

Goal

The OpenYurt UI/CLI Special Interest Group (SIG) was created to deliver an intuitive graphical dashboard and a full‑featured command‑line interface (CLI) that lower the adoption barrier, accelerate onboarding, and provide comprehensive documentation for developers.

Roadmap

CLI Tooling – Implement a CLI covering all OpenYurt capabilities with flexible configuration options.

Graphical Dashboard – Build a web UI that exposes core functions such as autonomy, node‑pool management, OTA upgrades, and edge device management.

Documentation & Tutorials – Publish detailed installation guides, usage examples, and FAQs.

User Feedback Loop – Continuously collect community feedback to keep the tools aligned with new OpenYurt releases.

Planned Projects

1) Dashboard Refactor

Separate the dashboard from the legacy experience‑center project, decouple it from the experience‑center User controller, and align its APIs with the latest OpenYurt version.

2) OpenYurt Automated Installation

Provide a dashboard‑driven installation flow on top of the existing Helm deployment. Users can select desired OpenYurt components in the web console and trigger a one‑click install.

3) Feature Integration into Dashboard

Expose most OpenYurt capabilities directly through the dashboard, including:

Cross‑domain communication management.

Node‑pool governance UI.

OTA upgrade management.

Edge device management.

4) OpenYurt Lab

The dashboard will showcase typical use cases, such as EdgeXFoundry‑integrated device management, providing an interactive experience for deeper platform understanding.

5) yurtadm Optimization

Improve the yurtadm CLI based on user feedback. Planned enhancements include:

Support adding nodes to specific node pools – see https://github.com/openyurtio/openyurt/pull/1402.

Enable yurtadm join to fetch and load the cloud‑hosted kubeadm-config ConfigMap – see https://github.com/openyurtio/openyurt/issues/1448.