The Machine Room

Product Documentation

Over the past few months, our Product Team has been working towards documenting everything offered here at gridscale. We’re chuffed to announce that the gridscale Product Documentation is finally live!

Intended to be the single source of truth for all features and functionalities, the documentation covers IaaS, PaaS, Object Storage, APIs as well as Dedicated Hardware offerings. Keep your eyes peeled for more updates to follow in the near future.

Storages

ROCKET STORAGE

Featuring low latencies and blazing fast I/O performance, Rocket Storage is the ideal solution for advanced database systems and enterprise workloads. Our high performance NVMe-based local storage solution is now available within the Lucerne location.

OBJECT STORAGE

Our S3-compatible Object Storage has been refreshed with several new features and UI/UX improvements.

Within the Panel, Access Keys are now located within a dedicated Access Key tab.

You also have the option to view both your buckets and objects in a grid or list view.

Navigate to your bucket and access the Bucket Settings in order to set the following new features:

• Enable bucket websites, allowing you to host a static public website
• Enable object versioning, add an extra security layer for easy recovery from potential failures and user errors
• Configure bucket lifecycle, set bucket-level rules to automatically delete objects based on criteria that you set

PaaS – gridSQL

Along with upgrading our Microsoft SQL Server service offering to the latest update, the SQL Server Agent is now enabled by default. The Server Agent allows you to run scheduled jobs either in response to a specific event or on demand. For instance, if you wish to back up data at the end of every weekday, you can automate this task using the Agent.

Our Microsoft SQL Server service now supports adding an Object Storage bucket to which backups can be created or restored from. This can be configured via the API or Expert Panel.

Another feature which came about from this backup integration, is being able to manage the lifetime of incomplete multipart uploads within a lifecycle policy. Due to the way object storage works, failed files can be left around without the client being aware. Therefore we recommend using this if you notice that the Object Storage usage is too high without reason, or in general when working with uploading large files.

GSK – Managed Kubernetes

Our offering now supports vertical scaling via the API. We’ve also increased the number of storages that you can connect to a server from eight to sixteen. We’ve upgraded the provisioner to the latest gridscale Terraform Provider, offering significant performance improvements. In addition to this, up to fifteen storages can be attached to a server and the default hardware profile has also been set to Q35.

VERSIONING

We’re currently working on supporting the latest Kubernetes versions 1.20 and 1.21. Along with the release of these versions we’d like to bring up the topic of deprecation – within the next few weeks customers that are running versions 1.16, 1.17 and 1.18 will be prompted to upgrade their clusters, until eventually required to upgrade. Deprecated versions will no longer receive non critical patch updates.

Templates

We’ve improved our template offerings to include the latest Ubuntu 16.04.7 and 18.04.5 LTS templates. All Linux templates no longer have nobarrier enabled by default.

API

The Usage API now displays the fields `accumulated_usage` and `current_usage_in_minutes`. In addition to this, the `usage_in_minutes` fields have been deprecated, along with the previously deprecated `current_price` field.

Ecosystem

gridscale’s in-house tools and libraries, intended to optimize and simplify workflows, saw several updates during the course of the previous month.

We’ve updated our JS-based API client, gsclient-js to v1.1.5. Changes include a new method to list Object Storage buckets and an updated API specification, along with additional properties returned by certificate responses, and third party library updates.

Our Go-based API client gsclient-go was updated to v3.6.3. In addition with improved request retry handling, we’ve also fixed a request read error.

gridscale’s Terraform Provider also saw an update to v1.10.0 featuring improved validations, customizable request delay interval and maximum number of retries. New features include TLS/SSL certificate and data source, Microsoft SQL Server and MariaDB resources. We’ve also extended the documentation as well.