As a wrap up to 2020, I would like to give a short and precise overview of the product changes that happened in 2020. All in all it was a really good year, we’ve seen a few priority shifts, meaning that we’ve released some alternatives instead of some products/features that were already mentioned in the initial 2020 roadmap. This shift in priority resulted from needs we saw among our partner and customer base as well as further market research.

Products released

In this section I’ll go into a little more detail on the products that we released without previous announcement, since products that we previously announced in the 2020 roadmap were described in more detail there.

Rocket Storage

Starting with a fast one. In 2020 we have completely re-imagine how we offer storage, with the addition of Rocket Storage.

Rocket Storage is an NVMe based local storage designed for the highest of workloads. Since it is local storage it comes with inherent pros and cons, like being much faster, with lower latency. The data is no longer highly available – therefore a backup plan is highly recommended.

Price point: at just 0,19 € per GB/month (the same price as our standard speed Distributed Storage) and roughly one hundred times faster I/O – this is a great product to use if your application requires extremely fast storage and low latency.

The previously available “storage” is now known as “Distributed Storage” and comes with it’s own set of distinct features like high availability from triple data redundancy and available in three different storage speeds.

Redis 5.0 Cache & Store

Upgrading from version 4.0 -> 5.0 brings in itself a lot of new features. We now also offer a Persistent variant of Redis called Redis Store which is important for applications that require data consistency. Redis will write to a persistent disk which will be available even across restarting the service. Obviously if you are just using it as a cache we recommend to go for the Redis Cache option.

To put the service in a market comparison – our Managed Redis Databases prices are priced extremely competitively – our Redis Store is the best in price to performance ratio.
We also offer Redis Store (data persistence) at all RAM configurations without having to be on a premium support plan, unlike some other providers.

Integrations

Our integrations allow so many opportunities – moving over easily from another provider, building your infrastructure as code, automation and so much more. I would like to point out our Terraform provider became feature complete, since it uses our gsclient-go API client they both follow the product developments closely and see regular updates. We are also in the process of publishing our own Hashicorp Packer integration – allowing you to easily manage your machine images on gridscale, as well as nicely integrating into our Marketplace.

GSK – gridscale Managed Kubernetes

Since it’s official release at the beginning of the year there have been a huge amount of developments in our GSK. Firstly being released from the labs phase, and then staying up to date with the Kubernetes upstream as well as many features and improvements along the way. In 2021 you can expect further native Kubernetes features like node pools and auto scaling as well as further integrations with our platform, namely our Platform Services.

Wrapping up

I wanted to keep this short and sweet while focusing on the larger product efforts that weren’t specifically highlighted before. Of course, this means some features weren’t released or pushed back slightly (like Platform Services + PaaS features, Virtual Locations etc) but this doesn’t mean they aren’t coming! Early 2021 you can already expect custom SMTP servers, Managed Microsoft SQL Server, Virtual Locations, custom SSL Certificates and Kubernetes upgrades. I’ll be providing some more insights into our roadmap soon, and look forward to seeing you there.

Marc Harriss
Product Owner