1st chunk of `content/en/blog/_posts/2016-04-00-Building-Awesome-User-Interfaces-For-Kubernetes.md`
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---
title: " SIG-UI: the place for building awesome user interfaces for Kubernetes "
date: 2016-04-20
slug: building-awesome-user-interfaces-for-kubernetes
url: /blog/2016/04/Building-Awesome-User-Interfaces-For-Kubernetes
author: >
Piotr Bryk (Google)
---
_**Editor's note:** This week we’re featuring [Kubernetes Special Interest Groups](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/wiki/Special-Interest-Groups-(SIGs)); Today’s post is by the SIG-UI team describing their mission and showing the cool projects they work on._
Kubernetes has been handling production workloads for a long time now (see [case studies](http://kubernetes.io/#talkToUs)). It runs on public, private and hybrid clouds as well as bare metal. It can handle all types of workloads (web serving, batch and mixed) and enable [zero-downtime rolling updates](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C6YeyyUUmI). It abstracts service discovery, load balancing and storage so that applications running on Kubernetes aren’t restricted to a specific cloud provider or environment.
The abundance of features that Kubernetes offers is fantastic, but implementing a user-friendly, easy-to-use user interface is quite challenging. How shall all the features be presented to users? How can we gradually expose the Kubernetes concepts to newcomers, while empowering experts? There are lots of other challenges like these that we’d like to solve. This is why we created a special interest group for Kubernetes user interfaces.
**Meet SIG-UI: the place for building awesome user interfaces for Kubernetes**
The SIG UI mission is simple: we want to radically improve the user experience of all Kubernetes graphical user interfaces. Our goal is to craft UIs that are used by devs, ops and resource managers across their various environments, that are simultaneously intuitive enough for newcomers to Kubernetes to understand and use.
SIG UI members have been independently working on a variety of UIs for Kubernetes. So far, the projects we’ve seen have been either custom internal tools coupled to their company workflows, or specialized API frontends. We have realized that there is a need for a universal UI that can be used standalone or be a standard base for custom vendors. That’s how we started the [Dashboard UI](http://github.com/kubernetes/dashboard) project. Version 1.0 has been recently released and is included with Kubernetes as a cluster addon. The Dashboard project was recently featured in a [talk at KubeCon EU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sARH5zQhovE), and we have ambitious plans for the future!
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