Series: Alternative Cloud Providers (Part 4) The German Alternative from Cologne, Germany: Gridscale
In our series of Alternatives to the “big Three” of Cloud computing, AWS, Google and Microsoft, we are today with Gridscale by a German provider. The Cloud providers to distinguish themselves by reliability, customer proximity and safety of the competition.
Companies
(Image: gridscale)
Gridscale Cloud-technology provider with headquarters in Cologne, is understood as its American counterparts, Vultr, digital ocean or Linode as a direct Alternative to the three Hyper-scalers. It is the only place with around 100 employees from Henrik Hasenkamp and Felix Kronlage-Dammers.
“As an Innovator in the market, Cloud Computing, Gridscale, a number of Alternative”, held two years ago, Maximilian Hille, Senior Analyst & Mobile Practice Lead at Crisp Research in a Report. As the largest target group has been identified, in addition to developers explicitly to the German Mittelstand, we want to meet on eye-level with the Services, reliability, customer proximity and safety.
“Just the often inexperienced German medium-sized companies can benefit its way to the Cloud Gridscale,” says Henrik Hasenkamp, CEO at Gridscale. “Due to the uncomplicated Handling, the technology, the Cloud Migration in the shortest amount of time is successful, and the much users, compared to large providers-friendly, so that a later change would mean no major effort.”
Safety certifications
Just the security is reported as a major plus point. The current absence of EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, and the ongoing discussion around questionable privacy on the global Cloud providers are, inter alia, in the Frankfurter Tier III data center (RZ) hosted offer a tail wind. Another data center location is since Recently also in Switzerland. Both the Gridscale technology, as well as the data centers are self-certified, including ISO 27001, ISO 9001, ISO 50001, ISO 22301, ISO 20001 and ISO 27018 as well as a Gridscale-a Trusted-Cloud award by the BMWi. Data will be backed up by Built-in Firewalls, Secure Private Networks, Identity Access Management, 2-factor authentication, and Encryption at Rest.
As a second major plus point for the people of Cologne call the “easy-to-understand interface”, with the help of the infrastructure is also used by people without deep IT expertise will be managed. A Kubernetes environment, the Management of Cloud-native Workloads with ease.
Supply and technology
In addition to Cloud servers Gridscale offers E-Commerce Setups, web server clustering, and complex Setups. Virtualization takes place by means of Bare-Metal virtualization (KVM Hypervisor), is encrypted using Encryption at Rest and TLS/SSL. The clients separation takes place at the Hypervisor, Storage and network level. In storage technology, Distributed SSD Storage is available in three classes of Storage available to the Hardware comes from HPE, Super Micro, Samsung, Intel, Juniper and Cisco.
Data can be stored from 1 GB up to 1 PB, Snapshots may be arbitrarily many. The provided RAM per VM from 1 GB up to 730 GB, for the automation Foreman Provider, Terraform Provider, Kubernetes, Ruby Fog Gem, Go SDK, Python SDK, and Node Lib is available. To Platform Services, there is managed relational databases, Key Value Stores, Object Storage, and load balancers. The network is running with IPv4 & IPv6, there is the possibility of the Multi-Carrier connection. Resellers of Gridscale Cloud platform a White Label options are available, which provide, for example, system vendors and data center operators the possibility of, as an independent Cloud Provider to its customers to occur.
“We translate the complexity of a data center (as a result of the location, power, cooling, storage systems, computing capacity, network connectivity, etc.) in a user-friendly interface, on the Basis of the user every Cloud infrastructure can be comfortable and intuitive to configure and start,” says CEO Hasenkamp about the technology approach of Gridscale. “In our architecture, we operate not only distributed, and highly secure Data Storage, but also deal with the extremely complex software and operating of databases, load balancers, Key-Value Stores, and Container-virtualization.”
Prices
In the free Trial mode, users can get a first impression of the functionalities. In the process, Cloud Automation, PaaS, Object Storage and load balancers are fully available. Unlike some of the “pure” Provider gridscale offers Managed Hostinga Team works closely with each customer or Partner.
The Prices minutes are billed accurately and are relatively transparent. A Server with a CPU and 4 GB of RAM per month with 27,65 euros. The Pay-Per-Use fees for active and inactive components can be retrieved in real-time, there are personal consumption charts available.
Self-learning Algorithms to improve the offer
“By consistently focusing our technology on data-based decisions and continuous improvement of our self-learning Algorithms, we can interpret them today, more than nine out of ten events in an exceptionally complex Cloud infrastructure correctly,” says Hasenkamp.
“In addition to the higher availability of our Services for us as operators of other benefits. So, we were able to set up, for example, a so-called dynamic capacity management, which helps us to use our resources much more efficiently. CPU-nodes are shut down if no load is expected, and in a timely fashion started again, if a dynamic system load of one or more customers is expected. Software Updates are installed in a way largely Autonomous. A necessary restart of individual components is planned algorithmically and implemented. Due to the possibility to transfer the shared infrastructure in the ongoing operation of other CPU nodes, is such an Update for the customer is not even noticeable and is, therefore, a routine activity.“
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