User Portal provides a web-based interface that enables you to manage your own cloud resources and account. Using the portal, you can create, manage and monitor virtual resources such as instances, volumes, object store, load balancers, databases and supplementary assets such as key pairs, security groups and many others. You can also manage the project these resources belong to - add or remove users authorized to use this project, view resource quota etc. The User Portal also provides an easy way to access billing to view one’s resource usage during any given period and past invoices.
The home page of the User Portal, also called a dashboard, contains an overview of your cloud resources. In this dashboard, you may find:
Quota is simply a resource cap, limiting amount of resources available to you. Consider quota a safety mechanism preventing uncontrolled resource usage (imagine a runaway script that started to create instances in endless cycle), which could otherwise result in a bill shock scenario, or even impact entire cloud operation. You cannot increase your own quota, however if you need more resources than your quota currently allows, you can always contact your provider's support team - they are there to help! Note that quota limits are not used for billing purposes - you are always billed for your actual resources usage, no matter what the quotas are.
In the left bottom part of the browser screen, there is an indicator light which can be either green with "Connected" message, or red with "Disconnected". This indicator shows if the user browser has on-line connection with the portal back-end to receive live updates on the resources changes, for example instance creation, updates or deletion. When green, the browser will refresh automatically upon such updates happening, even if they are initiated from the API directly or another browser. If red, the browser needs to be refreshed manually in order to get the updates from the backend.