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The Machine Room

In the “News from the machine room” article series, we regularly post content detailing exciting new products and relevant updates to our wide range of offerings. Would you like to try out for yourself what we write about here? Simply create a free account.

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Spring is finally here and we have some exciting news from our engine room. This month, we’ve been focused on further improving our platform and adding new features that will make launching your infrastructure even easier and more secure.

Let’s take a look at the latest developments at gridscale together!

Object Storage

1. Upload of encrypted files in Object Storage now possible 🎉

We now support SSE-C encryption for files in Object Storage. With this new feature you can encrypt your files during upload.

Once a file has been uploaded with an encryption key, only the user who has that key can download and view the contents of the file.

Customers who are in data-sensitive markets will especially appreciate this new feature.

We recommend using the AWS CLI for uploading and downloading because we have encountered issues with other tools (e.g. s3cmd) when dealing with encrypted objects.

2. User Data

When you create a new server, you now have the option to upload user data for system configuration on first startup.

User Data is textual data that is evaluated by tools such as cloud-init to perform setup actions such as creating new users or user groups, adding SSH public keys, or installing or updating software.

This feature allows you to automate the setup of your infrastructure, saving you time and effort. Especially if you need to perform similar setup actions on multiple servers, cloud-init is a real gamechanger.

The templates for Linux operating systems already come with cloud-init enabled, so when you create a new server, all you have to do is enter the data – either in the Cloud Panel or via the API.

cloud init
cloudbase

For Windows Server

For Windows machines, an updated template will be available soon that supports cloudbase-init for the same purpose.

To store User Data on a server, simply check the User Data box. You can find it in the advanced settings.

Of course you can also find a corresponding section on User Data in our product documentation.

Server User Data

3. Terraform Provider gridscale

The Terraform Provider for gridscale has been released in version 1.18.1. This update brings improvements and bug fixes to the provider, making it more reliable and efficient. You can now provision gridscale resources using the latest version of Terraform.

Terraform gridscale

4. gscloud

The gscloud has been updated to version 0.12.2. This update brings bug fixes and performance improvements to the CLI tool, making it more stable and efficient.