Flamenco Manager End User Features

End users are both artists and TDs.

Farm Management

• Downloading and installing Flamenco Manager
• Downloading and installing Flamenco Worker
• Configuring Flamenco Manager
  • job types / customisation
  • storage locations
  • replace one-way variables with provisioned configuration
  • use path variables also for config of other areas (Shaman currently requires a configuration setting to be the same value as some path variable)
• Connecting Workers to Manager
• Managing workers
  • wakeup/sleep/shutdown/pause
  • blacklists
  • host stats (mem/cpu usage, etc.)
• Upgrading Flamenco Manager
  • Shut down, replace executable, restart.
  • DB migrations via migrate
• Upgrading Flamenco Worker
  • Shut down, replace executable, restart.
• GUI support?

Job Submission

• new Blender Add-on

  • querying for job types & their parameters
  • querying for Manager configuration
  • integrating BAT

• Project-association

  • Not mandatory
  • Based on metadata filtering

Job Management

• OpenAPI 3/Swagger for REST API, gives nice web interface for documentation and experimenting by TDs.
• Web interface
  • Web sockets for real-time updates.
  • Maybe also using the REST API for certain operations? Or everything through the web socket?
• Reconsider the end-of-life behaviour of jobs
  • Do we still need "Archive"?
  • Jobs in "archiving" status probably don't need to be shown in the main jobs list.
  • Andy: only interesting bit is the job definition itself (which shot was rendered when, etc.)

Web Views

In general: filtering (tasks, jobs, maybe even workers) is important.
- Kitsu is nice, allows querying and saving those queries.

• Worker status
  • Similar to what we have now.
  • Optionally with host info (CPU/mem usage graphs, etc.)
• Last-rendered image
  • Also similar to what we have now.
  • Optionally switch from server-sent events to websocket to limit communication channels.
• Jobs overview
  • Most important page, good candidate for default view.
  • Basics similar to current Flamenco Server.
  • Must include progress indicator
    • percentage of completed tasks
    • "X of Y frames" / "X of Y samples" showing on mouse-over
  • Aggregated view (X active, X failed, X completed, etc.)
  • Bigger view (than Flamenco Server) of the job list, and less on the side. Not a 50/50% split. Mostly because job names are so long.
  • Status doesn't need the entire word "COMPLETED", little icon + colour is enough.
  • Filtering by status is important.
  • "Edit RNA Overrides" button is used in practice, so keep it around.
  • "Recreate Job" vs. "Requeue Tasks" is confusing, probably should be merged or "Recreate Job" simply removed.
  • Add "browse" button to file path job settings, which launches a file browser. Maybe also configurable to show a image sequence viewer.
• Tasks per job
  • Aggregated view first (X active, X failed, X completed, etc.)
  • List of tasks should either just load all tasks or progressively with infinite scroll. Just loading everything is probably best, because that'll allow simple searches with Ctrl+F.
  • Should allow sorting & filtering.
    • "Lock task selection" to avoid tasks disappearing.
  • "Batch" operations (select tasks, or auto-select tasks with a certain status) and hit the "requeue" button (or cancel or whatever).
• Settings
  • Reconsider "settings mode", many people find it confusing.
  • Should list available job types, including whether they've been customised or not. Might have them editable & allow saving embedded default scripts to disk.

Actions: Job

This documents the behaviour of the current incarnation of Flamenco.

Actions are available depending on the job status. Some statuses do not allow any actions.

job status	cancel	requeue	recreate	archive	requeue-failed-tasks
active	✅				✅
canceled		✅	✅	✅
completed		✅	✅	✅
construction-failed			✅
failed	✅	✅		✅
paused		✅	✅	✅
queued	✅				✅
archived
archiving
cancel-requested
fail-requested
requeued
under-construction
waiting-for-files

Desired changes

• Add action PAUSE which can be used when a job is active.
• Alternative rename "canceled" status to "stopped", and then "cancel" and "pause" can be the same operation.

Actions: Task

This documents the behaviour of the current incarnation of Flamenco.

Actions are available depending on the task status. Some statuses do not allow any actions.

task status	requeue	cancel
active		✅
canceled	✅
completed	✅
failed	✅
queued		✅
soft-failed		✅
cancel-requested
fail-requested
paused
processing

Authentication

TODO: See what OpenAPI 3 has for this.

Advanced features

• Connecting Manager to Server