The Machine Room

July 2021

Product documentation

The product documentation is our central knowledge database for all features and functions. We are constantly adding new information to this pool of knowledge, including in recent weeks.

In the GSK Managed Kubernetes section, we now explain in detail how you can work with Kubernetes container logs. We have also added FAQs in several places in the documentation. We will continue to add to these in the coming weeks and provide regular updates.

API

You can now also manage contracts and users with favorites in the Partner API. This saves you time when searching and managing.

We have updated the information on password requirements for OS templates in the API documentation.

GSK – Managed Kubernetes

We are pleased to announce that GSK now supports versions 1.20 and 1.21. To simplify the upgrade process, we have shortened the total upgrade time for all clusters and versions.

Load balancers in GSK now support custom SSL certificates via service annotations, available for clusters running version 1.19 or newer. You can now also create kubeconfigs much faster.

You can read more about these changes in the product documentation.

No more resource processing

With GSK, you can monitor resources such as servers or storage that are required for the operation of the clusters. These displayed resources of the GSK clusters are write-protected from version 1.19 and can no longer be edited. This means that server configurations such as the number of cores or RAM can no longer be changed. The firewall rules cannot be updated either.

The main reason for these restrictions is to ensure stability. In the past, newly added firewall rules could lead to errors when providing cluster resources. Changes made to servers were reset by Kubernetes during the automatic restore or update process.

Together with our latest release for vertical and horizontal scaling, this makes our GSK even more stable. We are also currently working on further improvements such as RWX (ReadWriteMany) volumes, which can be used without having to provide your own server.

Prevention of potential pod failures

We would like to draw your attention to a problem that has existed with Kubernetes since 2018. Kubernetes mounts secrets such as service accounts under ‘/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount’. Since secrets are read-only, pods may crash if they are mounted in a location before ‘/run/secrets’. To prevent this from happening, we recommend using the recommended work-around.

Templates

We have added ArchLinux 2021.07.01, Rocky Linux, NetBSD v9.2, OpenBSD v6.9 and CentOS v8.4 images. We have also improved the boot performance for Debian-based templates.

Invoicing

We have improved the layout of the invoices in order to present the invoice information in a clearer and more comprehensible way.

Public Panel

We have integrated the “running costs” item into the dashboard overview.

It is no longer possible to activate a Virtual Location without stored billing data. If you would like to take advantage of this hardware offer, navigate to your account settings and add your billing information.

Partner Panel

We have improved the graphical representation of the dashboard to give you a better overview of your cloud usage. This applies to the most important key financial figures, including sales, earnings and costs.

VNC console

If one of the servers you are running becomes inactive, it will no longer have VNC access in the expert panel.

PaaS – gridSQL

As part of the optimization of our platform services, we have improved the reliability of Microsoft SQL Server database migrations.

Hardware profiles

We have optimized the platform’s default Q35 profile to run asynchronous and parallel workloads smoothly by enabling I/O threads.

Subscribe to our feeds to never miss any news again: Blog, Release Notes.