Guide to the web platform

• How to purchase a service on VKube

  • Signup/Login VKube
  • Available services
  • Place an order
  • View order details
  • View purchased services

• How to use VKube services

  • VKube dashboard
  • Containers
  • Container status dialog
  • Deploy a container
  • Operating the container
    • Restart
    • Stop
    • Config
    • Redeploy
    • Domain
    • Alias
    • Contract
    • Policy
    • Delete
    • Notice
    • Single Container Operation
      • Log
      • Monitor
      • Upgrade

How to purchase a service on VKube

Signup/login VKube

Visit https://vkube.vcloud.systems (opens new window) to sign up as a first-time user. Accounts are IP-based, which means that new users will only need to set up a password and save the back-up seed phase displayed during registration.

Available services

Click on "Purchase", you can see all available services and place an order. Click order button to go to purchase configuration.

Create your order

Click Create button to create an order, or click "shopping cart" button to add an order.

As shown in the figure below, users can check shopping list in shopping cart icon in the upper right corner.

Complete the payment

Click on "My Orders" to complete the payment of your service and start deploying your container. Click on Pay button it will appear a payment dialogue, you can click the "Pay" button to complete the payment.

Payment dialogue

Review the order details and select the token you want to pay with (VSYS or USDV). And you also can use the third party payment.

Review your purchased services

Click on "My Services" on the left to view the services you have purchased. To start deploying a container, click on Secret. If you need to Refund or Renew the Service, please click on the corresponding buttons.

How to use VKube services

VKube Dashboard

Under "My Services", click on Secret to copy the service secret key. You will be automatically redirected to "My Containers", where you can paste the service secret key in the search bar. Click on Add and then you will see the service detail.

Please note that each service secret key corresponds to a container, and it is stored in the local cache. The service secret key will be erased once you empty the browser cache.

Adding or deleting service secret keys won’t affect your service info or status. Please note that the container can not be deployed again after the first time.

Containers

As you can see, there are three areas in above picture. In area one, there are one input box and four buttons. In area two, this is the header of data table. In area three, this is the real data.

First Area:

Add is used to add the service in the input box to this page. Refresh is to refresh the web page. ImageHub is used to record the private ImageHub credentials information. Synchronize is used to synchronize the pods from the remote server.

• ImageHub: Click the ImageHub button and click the "Save Account", it will appears a pop-up window as the follow picture. Select the different image libraries by the selection box and then fill in your account credentials. It can help you to avoid input the credentials every time you deploy services.

• Synchronize: When you use another computer or different browsers to sign up the same account, you can't see the containers data via "Containers" aside. At this time, you can click the Synchronize button and then you can see the same data.

Second Area:

"Service ID" refers to the number of the service created. "Label" is the description you label the service when after deploying it. "Container Status" refers to the status of the pod. "Service Status" refers to the status of the service. Under "Actions", you can find the Deploy, Alias, Contact, Policy, Delete buttons:

• Deploy: If the container has not been deployed yet, the Deploy button will be displayed. It will disappear once the container has been deployed.

• Alias: It you want to update the service access port and alias the service name, you can use this button. Then in the same region, your services can access this service by aliasName:aliasPort.

• Contact: For a certain service, after binding an email, when any abnormal situations occur with the service, relevant notifications will be sent. Notification message includes the service expired or Restart operation, etc. The binding of an email address can also be done on the user level. If you bind two emails at the same time, the difference between them are as follows. Suppose you have purchased three services, and one of them is bound to email A, while the user level is bound to email B, For the service bound to email A, related notifications will be sent to email A, and for the other two services, notifications will be sent to email B. As shown in the figure below, by clicking on the user's avatar, you can add and bind an email in the Account section.

• Policy: The network policy acts as a whitelist , specifying which services can access your service within the same region. You can define rules that allow only particular services or those associated with specific accounts to make requests to your service. After clicking the Policy button, the next step is clicking the "Add Rules" button and then fill in the service ID which can access your service in the same region.

• Delete: Delete the service secret keys in the Local Storage. This will not impact the operation of the remote container. You can add it again by using Add button in area one.

Third Area:

You can click on the arrow on the left side of each row to view the corresponding details. As the follow picture shows:

• Service Name: Service name of the Container defined by the container creator.
• Created Time: Time of order creation
• Expired Time: Time at which the service expired time. If the expired time is displayed, then the container can’t be used any longer.
• Service Duration: Total duration of the service.
• Address: VSYS wallet address used to purchase the service.
• Recipient: VSYS wallet address of the merchant providing the service (VKube by V Systems)
• Service Option: Parameters of the container. This information is embedded inside a collapsing menu, accessible by clicking on the arrow icon besides the Service Options.
• Status: Current service status, including "Pending", "Running", "CrashLoopBackOff" and so on.

Container status dialog

• Display the status and information of all containers, including the past and current container status, configuration info, and current status

• You can view the container Service ID in the dialog box. You can slide up, down, left, and right in the lower area to view the status information in json format

Deploy a container

After placing an order, the container status will be "Pending" and the Deploy button will appear. Start deploying your container,as shown in the figure below:

1. First, choose your image which is from Dockerhub or Github
2. Second, enter the image information. Currently, the supported images can be from dockerhub and GitHub. It supports public and private images.

• Public images: For DockerHub, the recommended format is name:tag (e.g. nginx:latest). For Github, the recommended format is account name/image name:tag(e.g. john/redis:7.2.1).

• Private images: For Dockerhub, the recommended format is account name/private repository:tag. For Github, the recommended format is account name/image name:tag. You also need to fill in the account and password. It is recommended to use a PAT(Personal Access Token) as the password. Before deployment, the corresponding image will be queried at the repository address, so you must ensure that the image with the corresponding tag is readable in the image repository. As shown in the figure below, the system will check image is existed or not.

3.Third, click the Deploy button to deploy. Containers names must adhere to certain rules; they can include letters (a-z, A-Z), numbers (0-9), and hyphens (-), but can not start or end with a hyphen. The system will review each input before submitting the deployment request. Don't worry,the system will validate your input, as shown in the figure above.

Options:

• "Add ports" to add a container and a host port pair (neither the container nor the host port can be empty in a port pair). The number of ports available is displayed, and the number of ports used is indicated under Service Options. The number of container ports ranges from 1 to 65535. Port numbers can not be reused within a container. The system will check if a host port is occupied in the selected Region.
• Click on "Add config" and then it will appear a window. In the window, you can see the upload icon and you can use it to upload your local configuration file.
• Click on "+" to add variables (name and value) to deploy the container.
• Click on the arrow on the right side of "Advanced" to enter the command and argument for container deployment.

Once the container is successfully deployed, you will be able to perform the following functions: Restart, Stop, Config, Redeploy, Domain, Contact, Delete

Operating the container

As shown in the figure below, after the deployment is completed, the allowed operations on the container: Restart, Stop, Config, Redeploy, Domain, Contact, Delete. The Notice action area is some error message when the container is abnormal.

Restart

Click the Restart button, the all containers belong this service will stop first, and then start again.

Stop

Click the Stop button, the all containers belong this service will be stopped. If you want to start again, you should click the Start button. It should be noted that after the Stop operation, billing does not stop. For example, if you purchase a 2-hour service, it is successfully deployed at 8:00, and expires at 10:00. If you perform the Stop operation at 9:00, and then restart at 9:30, the expiration time will not be extended to 10:30, but remains at 10:00. It means that the "End Time" in the follow picture is unchanged. As shown in the figure below, the "End Time" is unchanged.

Config

Select one of the container names and configure the container and environment variables. Manual configuration is allowed, as well as the option to upload a configuration file. It should be noted that the file upload operation reads the file to the front end, and the actual configuration still requires clicking the Confirm button. Environment variables can also be manually configured by clicking + Add to add configurations, or - to reduce them.

Redeploy

Redeployment means you can deploy new software. For example, you can deploy Nginx for the first time and then Redis during redeployment. The process of redeployment is the same as the first time. It should be noted that after redeployment, the logs of previously deployed containers will be deleted.

Domain

Bind domains to container:As shown in the figure below, you can bind one or more domain name for one container.

• Support binding multiple domain names
• Unbind All to unbind all domain
• Unbind single domain
• Add a single domain

Alias

You can use this button to alias your service name. It has already been introduced before at Containers.

Contact

As shown in the figure below, click on Contact to fill in your contact information, then click the Send Code button. After receiving the verification code, enter it and click the Verify Code button to bind this service. When the service expires or you perform a Restart operation, you will receive relevant notifications.

Delete

Clicking the Delete button will remove the service you're operating from the current page. If you need to restore it, you must go back to "My Services" page, copy the deleted service secret, then go back to the "My Containers" page and click the Add button to make the service appear again.

Policy

It has already been introduced before at Containers.

Notice

For message notifications, clicking Notice will allow you to view alerts about abnormal container statuses, such as Restarted, OOM Killed, etc.

Single Container Operation

Clicking the downward-facing triangle on the right side of Containers will bring up a popup window displaying the list of containers that the service is actually deployed on. For each container, there are three actions: Log, Monitor, and Upgrade, as shown in the figure below.

Log

Click the Log button to view the log of the container. You should fill in start time and end time and then click on Search button to see the logs. You can click on Reset button if you want to clear the logs.

Monitor

Monitor button allows you to view information such as the memory and CPU usage of the current container. As shown in the figure below.

Upgrade

As shown in the figure below, you can upgrade the container image. Upgrading an image refers to update the image of the same software. For instance, if the initial image you were running was Nginx, the image must still be Nginx when you update, only differing in version. For private images, you will still need to fill in your account credentials. Please refer to the deployment steps mentioned above.