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A Fresh New Look: Rafay Console Gets a UI/UX Makeover for Enhanced Usability

At Rafay, we believe that user experience is as critical as the powerful automation capabilities we deliver. With that commitment in mind, we’ve been working for the last few months on a revamp of the Rafay Console User Interface (UI). The changes are purposeful and designed to streamline navigation, increase operational clarity, and elevate your productivity. Whether you’re managing clusters, deploying workloads, or orchestrating environments, the new interface will put everything you need right at your fingertips.

The new UI will launch as part of our v3.5 Release scheduled to rollout end of May 2025. We understand change is hard and it can take a few hours for users to get used to the new experience. Note that existing projects and configurations remain unchanged, and users can continue managing their infrastructure and applications without interruption.

In this blog, we provide a closer look at the most impactful improvements and how they will benefit our users.

Migration

Changes & Benefits

The recently introduced PaaS Studio and End User facing Developer Hub self service portal in the Rafay Platform were designed 100% with TailwindCSS. The core Infrastructure portion of the console was originally designed using Material >6 years back.

With this release, we are starting a gradual migration to TailwindCSS for the Infrastructure portion as well. Let's review some of changes to the UI, workflows and the benefits you will experience.

1. Modernized Visual Hierarchy & Layout

The first thing you’ll notice is the fresh, modern layout that prioritizes content visibility and accessibility. In the old UI, project cards were presented in a grid format. While functional, it often led to visual overload when managing large portfolios of projects. Many of our customers now use 100s of projects supporting 100s or 1000s of users across the organization.

Before

Old Projects

After

The new interface adopts a cleaner list-based layout with subtle visual cues that make it easier to scan, filter, and prioritize projects. Important actions like accessing clusters, workloads, and environments are now grouped consistently under each project entry — helping users orient themselves faster.

New Projects

2. Streamlined Navigation Experience

The revamped left-hand navigation bar provides persistent, context-aware access to key modules: Home, Dashboards, Template Catalog, System, and My Tools. This reorganization helps users jump between tasks and tools more efficiently, especially in multi-project, multi-tenant environments.

Real estate is valuable in the UI.

As we added new features to the Rafay Platform, it became apparent that we were not utilizing available real estate effectively. The previous UI relied on top navigation for everything — making context switching cumbersome, especially for power users who operate across different modules in rapid succession.

Old Tools

3. Scalability for Power Users

Users with dozens (or even hundreds) of projects now benefit from significantly better scalability. The new layout makes project cards more compact and searchable, supporting higher information density without sacrificing readability.

For enterprise platform teams, this can be a game-changer. Whether you’re onboarding new tenants or launching multi-region workloads, you can now manage projects faster and with fewer clicks.

New Nav

4. Consistent Design Language

Across the board, the new UI adopts a more consistent design language — from iconography and button styles to spacing and typography. These refinements might seem subtle, but they dramatically reduce the cognitive load for users, particularly during complex workflows like cluster creation, environment configuration, or blueprint deployments.

5. Built for Extensibility

Many of our customers are Cloud Providers and MSPs that white label our platform. With TailwindCSS, our customers are not locked to one visual style (i.e. Material Design). Interfaces can be fully customized to reflect your company’s brand, tone, and visual identity.

Most importantly, this UI revamp lays the groundwork for upcoming capabilities in the Rafay Platform. Stay tuned for additional updates in 2025.

Try it on Preview

The new Rafay Console UI will be available in Rafay's Preview Environment for all customers before rolling out to Production/SaaS.

Info

Please contact Rafay CS if you do not have access to a Preview Org. We would love to hear your feedback! Please let us know how it’s helping you move faster, manage smarter, and innovate confidently.