The Machine Room

April 2021

CPU and RAM hot-plugging is discontinued

We have decided to switch off CPU and RAM hot-plugging in the next 4-8 weeks.

On the current gridscale platform, CPU and RAM resources can be added to a server while it is still running. This is called hot-plugging. The main advantage is flexibility, which helps to avoid downtime if additional resources need to be added. However, this technology is based on a fundamental architectural decision regarding the configuration of instances. In order to be able to add further CPU cores during operation, each core must be located in its own virtual socket. The same applies to the main memory: To “simply add a few more gigabytes of RAM”, the memory is divided into 1 GB blocks.

However, it should be noted that the performance of an application may not scale linearly with the amount of RAM. For example, a server with 8 GB RAM may not have exactly twice as much performance as a 4 GB server. The same applies to the CPU. Modern software often scales horizontally and not vertically and some do not support multithreading. In addition, adding resources to a running server is done on a best-effort basis, which is not the most reliable way to run a cloud infrastructure.

According to our measurements, multi-core performance can be increased by up to 20% if we move from a single-core-per-socket to a multi-virtual-core setup. To achieve this, hot-plugging must be removed from the platform.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us at support@gridscale.io.

Renaming of the “Availability Zones” to Affinity Zones

With Availability Zones, you can configure a hardware-based separation. If hardware resources allow, we will not place servers in different availability zones for the same hardware, but the term “availability” is often used imprecisely – sometimes it refers to the separation of data centers, sometimes not. We will therefore rename it “Affinity Zones” to make it more precise.

Upgrade to Partner Panel

As a Public Panel user, you can upgrade to our Partner Panel to access additional management tools for your cloud infrastructure. We take care of all the steps for you in the quick and easy upgrade process.

In the clear and uniform administration interface, each account is treated as a separate organizational unit. Each account has its own individual object memory in the Partner Panel. In contrast to the users and projects in the Public Panel, which have access to the same object memory.

As a partner, you can assign user rights for individual accounts. You also have access to simplified cost overviews that give you additional insight into total costs and a breakdown of income on an account-by-account basis.

In addition to the standard partner panel, the white label offer allows you to customize the user interface and cloud infrastructure for your company – an ideal offer for cloud resellers.

You can find more information on our reseller page.

Partner and public panels

The login areas for both partners and customers now have a more uniform design.

We were able to clarify why client owners cannot be changed in the Partner Panel if only one user is connected to a client. For feature flags with dependencies, it was possible to deactivate a feature that was required by another feature, e.g. IPs and load balancers. A warning message now appears when certain feature flags are deactivated.

In addition, the load balancer interface has a redesigned “empty state”. This means that for functions that are not in use, you will find a short description and a note on how to start the feature. More of these new empty states will follow.

ISO images

We have added pfSense 2.5.1 and FreeBSD 13 to the list of available images.

Templates

This month we have revised the templates for CentOS 8, Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 20.04.2 and created a new template for Fedora 33. Ubuntu 21.04 will be added to our list of templates soon.

API

We have updated our API documentation with examples for the Marketplace Application area. Within the documentation, you now also have the option of accessing the contract management API documentation.

Github ecosystem

The gridscale tools and libraries for optimizing and simplifying workflows have been updated several times.

We have released an update of the command line interface for the gridscale API, gscloud, to v0.10.0. New features include sub-commands that provide a quick account overview including API tokens, as well as all available Managed Kubernetes (GSK) and PostgreSQL versions. This version fixes the gscloud build on OpenBSD. The gscloud package for FreeBSD also supports the latest version.

Our Go-based API client gsclient-go has been updated to v3.6.2. The client makes it easier for an application to interact with the gridscale Cloud Platform and enables the creation and management of resources. This release includes fixes for service templates within PaaS update requests and fixes issues related to loss of concurrent log requests.

In addition, gridscale’s Terraform Provider has also been updated to v1.9.1 and thus supports the latest gsclient-go package. The new functions include the addition of GSK and PostgreSQL resources. We have also updated the Terraform user documentation.

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