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Overview

Four surfaces frame every page. Learning them saves a lot of clicking.

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The sidebar

Groups every resource area: Dashboard, Deployments, Compute, Storage, Networking, Images, Monitor, Organization, then Help & Support and Settings at the bottom. Click a group to expand it.
Your sidebar reflects your account. Screens still in development, ones your account isn’t entitled to, and ones your deployment has switched off are hidden rather than disabled — so two people on the same account can see different sidebars. Administrators see a DEV badge on internal previews. See what’s not yet available.

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The Create menu

Starts a resource from anywhere, without navigating first.
A Network entry exists but is hidden on current deployments, because networks are managed inside their VPC rather than standalone. Create one from VPC instead.
This is the fastest path to a new machine — it opens the wizard directly rather than making you find Compute → Virtual Machines → Create VM first.
Press ⌘K (or Ctrl+K) anywhere. The placeholder reads “Search VMs, networks, volumes, pages…”. Results group by type — Navigation, Virtual Machines, VPCs, Networks, Volumes, Snapshots, Public IPs, SSH Keys — with a Recent section above them when the box is empty.
Search also finds pages, so it doubles as a command palette: ⌘K then “firewall” jumps to Firewall Policies without touching the sidebar. It opens pre-populated with your recent items, so it’s often two keystrokes to get back to what you were doing.

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The account menu

Grouped into four blocks.
Security and Billing are not yet available — they close the menu and do nothing. For access management use Users; there is no billing screen in the console.
The Switch Tenant submenu is searchable and lists My Account (your personal context) plus every tenant you belong to, tagged Admin or Member.
The tenant you’re switched into determines which tenant anything you create belongs to, and a resource cannot be moved between tenants afterwards. Check the menu header — it shows the active tenant and your role in it — before creating anything. See Tenants.

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The region switcher

Titled Regions, listing every region the platform offers, grouped by continent, with a count of how many you’ve activated. Reset default returns to your default region. A Residency toggle keeps data in one region only.
Residency has real consequences: with the lock on, activating a second region is refused — “Account residency is locked. Turn off the lock before activating another Region.” While the policy is still being checked, activation stays disabled rather than guessing.
The region context filters every list. A machine in another region is genuinely absent from the list you’re looking at — that’s the model working, not data loss. This is the first thing to check when a resource seems to have disappeared. See Regions and zones.
There’s no separate zone selector in the chrome. Zone is chosen when you create a resource, and shown read-only afterwards.

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The taskbar

A slim strip along the bottom, showing what the platform is doing for you. Clicking the jobs button opens a resizable Jobs panel:
The taskbar turns red when something failed. That’s the cheapest signal in the console — you don’t have to be on the Jobs screen to know an operation went wrong. Click through for the reason. See Jobs for the full screen.

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Appearance

Set from the account menu’s Appearance block, or by clicking the theme pill in the taskbar to cycle System → Light → Dark. It follows your OS by default.

Lists and filters

Searching, filtering, sorting, tag grouping, and bulk actions.

Your dashboard

The first page you land on.

Jobs

The full asynchronous work queue.

Tenants

Why the active tenant matters so much.