Machine Room

August 2022

First things first

On September 1st we will disable the partner.gridscale.io URL. The partner panel module will move behind the cloud panel URL e.g. my.gridscale.io/partner and login will only be possible via the cloud panel e.g. my.gridscale.io/access. 

This change is necessary because certain functions are impossible via the URL partner.gridscale.io – because we don’t know what features are available to your partner, for example a magic link that allows passwordless login or password reset. Once you are on <cloud.panel.url>/Access, we can detect and offer the correct feature set. 

How can you prepare?

Make sure all statically configured deep links are updated. You can already see the new URLs live, as we redirect all “partner.gridscale.io/module” URLs to “<cloud.panel.url>/module”. 

Many detail improvements in Cloud Panel

Our new unified Cloud Panel has been around since the beginning of the year. During this time, we have taken your feedback and steadily improved the Cloud Panel:

Our global search has also improved. You can now search for load balancers, platform services, and GSK clusters.

We have also significantly improved the usability of our Cloud Panel at several points:

• Clicking on the location now displays location details in the “Project Management” section. 
• An improved drag-and-drop system, a better input field for phone numbers and an improved English translation ensure high usability. 
• A significantly improved overview of one’s data security, thanks to the prominent placement of storage backup statistics.
• An improved visualization of IP address ranges when processing DHCP services.
• An improved and accelerated login process thanks to the auto-login function.

Partner Panel

Especially in terms of usability, our partner panel has improved a lot:

• Price lists are now displayed in a drop-down menu for a location. This is a significant usability improvement, especially for partners with access to multiple locations.
• A customer’s invoice number can now be found in the list by the invoice overview.
• In the dashboard, our partners now can click on the best and worst performing accounts.

We have taken the Billing API out of service. Our partners now have access to our updated Contract Management API. This can be used to perform the same tasks and many more.

Hybrid Core

With the gridscale Hybrid Core you combine the best of the gridscale Public Cloud and a Private Cloud.

As a hybrid core partner, you want to have a complete overview of the available resources. This is now possible. In the Hybrid Core module in the Partner Panel, you can view all available resources per site. You can see exactly what hardware you have available and what is in use. This allows you to plan your resources better and market individual products in a more targeted manner.

We have also further improved the usability of the Hybrid Core module. You can now sort the detailed tables to see, for example, which nodes have the most memory available.

Platform Services 

New versions

We have added Postgres 14.4 to our list of Platform Services. 

ISO/IEC 27001 certifications and audit logging

PostgreSQL now includes a new audit log feature. This allows you to export logs generated by the service to an object storage bucket of your choice, this is important for customers who need to comply with strict ISO requirements such as ISO/IEC 27001 certifications.

PaaS integrates natively with private networks and our managed Kubernetes

You can now replace Security Zones with a private network. This enables IPv4 communications and native integration with existing GSK clusters. See the product documentation for details on how to natively connect GSK to our Platform Services.

Security Zone Deprecation 

Now that all services are using normal private networks, we can deprecate IPv6 Security Zones. Security Zones will now be deprecated within the next six months. For migration of Security Zones to private networks we will contact you soon. 

gridFs

Read/Write/Many Volumes – a feature that was frequently requested by you. Our answer: gridFs. Managing data in a network file system and making this data accessible to your applications on all GSK accounts at the same time is now possible. Legacy applications benefit from scaling the workload across the cluster. The application now does not need support for cloud-native technologies, such as S3 object storage. Online stores can use this for images or thumbnails of their items or to store invoices.

Object Storage

As mentioned in the last news from the machine room, we have revised the way Object Storage Access Keys work. All previously existing keys and buckets are only visible to users with admin access to an account. Write users can now only create keys and see buckets created with them in their account. You can separate access to buckets within an account. Now not every user in an account automatically has access to all buckets. We have also fully integrated this feature into the Cloud Panel. 

Read users, on the other hand, cannot interact with other keys.

	Access	Account Key	User Key
Owner	Can see all types of keys from all users in an account.	Can create and see all	Can create and see all
Admin	Can see all types of keys from all users in an account.	Can create and see all	Can create and see all
Write	Can only see their user access key.	Can not create or see	Can create and see only theirs

GSK – Managed Kubernetes

New release schedules and upgrade stability 

Patch upgrades can now be triggered directly from the panel. We have also released new GSK patch versions. Among other things, these releases contain many stability improvements and are rolled out automatically. 

For maximum freedom in your update cycles, from now on you will receive a notification in your panel at least three weeks before the minor/patch cluster updates. You can either coordinate with us on the proposed upgrade time window or trigger it yourself before the specified time.

To increase the stability of further upgrades in the future, we have introduced surge upgrades. This is a feature you can enable per cluster that allows us to add a Worker Node during upgrades. The additional Worker Node will be deleted once the upgrade is complete. So the cost is very manageable. With the surge upgrades, future upgrades will be safer for our customers because the workload will not affect the upgrade process.

Templates

We have removed CentOS 8 from our templates. It has not been available since January. As a replacement, we have selected three popular RedHat-compatible distributions: Rocky Linux, Alma Linux, and CentOS Stream 8. CentOS 7 is also still available.

Integrations

Our integrations have received the following version updates:

• Our gsclient-js has been updated to version v1.3.7.
• Our gsclient-go has been updated to version v3.10.0.
• Our Go-based API client gsclient-go has been updated to version v3.9.1. You can now attach Platform Services to Private Networks.
• The Terraform provider has been updated to v1.14.3, which includes bug fixes related to updating networks.
• Our JS-based API client, gsclient-js, has been updated to version 1.3.5.
• The Terraform provider has been updated to v1.14.2. API return codes can now be better served when updating the power status of a server, and the correct number of concurrent networks attached to a server can now be adjusted.
• Our JS-based API client, gsclient-js, has been updated to version 1.3.3.