The Machine Room

Partner Panel

We have recently launched our new Partner Panel. With the re-launch of the Platform Services in a new look and our new new Usage Dashboard, the Partner Panel has also been developed in a newly designed product development process.

The Partner Panel is the central place to manage customers and clients. With the above-mentioned release of the new Partner Panel in December, we have greatly expanded the possibilities for managing clients. In particular, client networking, formerly known as MPLS, is now available as an SDN module with a greatly improved user experience. An overview of the Partner Panel functions is available in our webinar which was published in summer 2019.

In addition to a holistic view of the Partner Panel from the users perspective and a focus on consistent and intuitive user guidance, all teams were involved in the development of the individual modules at an early stage. In so-called cross-dev team meetings the concept is discussed and the resulting consequences for the development are analyzed. In this way, problematic areas are identified early on in the later implementation.

Especially with complex modules such as the SDN module, known as MPLS in the old Partner Panel, this has proven to be very effective in the final implementation.

We proceeded in a similar way not only with the major innovations but also with the revision regarding the user experience of many smaller components. These, like our work in the ecosystem around gridscale, have appeared less with a big bang, but make the daily work with our platform much easier. By the way, our release notes are ideal to keep up to date on our many small improvements, including bug fixes.

Usage Dashboard

Our new Usage Dashboard in the Expert Panel was presented at the end of the third quarter of 2019. The new Usage Dashboard allows a detailed analysis of the costs incurred by the use of our gridscale platform. Feedback loops with users from our gridscale Labs are a part of our development cycle.

Here we provide an early insight into the development. This helps us to see new functions through the eyes of our customers and to gain valuable insights. As the development progresses, further development cycles are successively carried out after the launch – many of our partners and customers have already had contact with our product management team.

Github Ecosystem

With the release of several libraries and tools around our platform this year we have created a solid foundation for embedding gridscale into existing workflows.

Libraries and SDKs

The SDK for the go programming language, gsclient-go, covers our complete public API. An introduction to the use of gsclient-go can be found in this blog post. With gs_api_node and our libcloud driver, part of the Apache Libcloud project, we cover two more programming languages. If you want to work with Python, but not with Libcloud, we recommend a look at our Python library.

Terraform Provider

Terraform from Hashicorp has become the industry standard for Infrastructure-as-code in recent years. We released our official terraform provider this summer. To ease the start of working with Terraform and gridscale there is an additional repository with different examples.

Our work in the ecosystem area has created the building blocks for our customers and partners to integrate gridscale quickly and easily. Our Partner Panel is especially attractive for our partners, agencies and corporate clients.

Multi-Location and Multi-Projekt

After we opened our additional location at eShelter during the first half of the year, the partner panel also created the opportunity to create projects at the de/fra2 location as part of the launch. Together with Multi-Projekt, we now have the opportunity to build up infrastructures across different locations. By means of the project management, the end user panel now allows the division of resources into individual projects.

Both functions will be further expanded in the coming year. Project networking between locations will be provided as part of the SDN functionality in the Partner Panel.