Enterprise Cloud Playbook

This page gives an overview of the gridscale Enterprise Cloud and the main tools for working with it: the Partner Panel, the Cloud Panel and the gridscale APIs.

Partner, Accounts, Users, Projects

The gridscale Enterprise Cloud is a cloud management platform that is structured in Accounts and Projects, all under one entity called a Partner, as shown here:

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Under the Partner there can be multiple Accounts. Inside an Account there can be one or more Projects, each of which is tied to a specified Location. All cloud workloads live inside these Projects.

Every User has a set of credentials and their own user settings. Users can have access to dedicated Accounts and optionally to the Partner.

As displayed in the next image, there are different access levels, both on Partner and Account level. These access levels are inherited so that a User who has Admin access to the Partner also has Admin access to all Accounts below it.

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API first

The Enterprise Cloud follows an API-first approach, meaning that everything can be managed via rest-ful APIs, allowing for a high level of automation and command line control.

Documentation for those APIs is provided inside the Partner and Cloud Panels. Access to the APIs is managed via API tokens which can either have the same access level as their related User or further restrict access. E.g. a User with Write-Access can also create an API token with Read-Only access.

The Panels

The Partner Panel and the Cloud Panel are GUIs for the Enterprise Cloud. They are based entirely on the mentioned APIs, but have been created with a dedicated focus on a great User Experience to make working with the Enterprise Cloud easy, even for Users with little experience in cloud computing.

Both Panels are accessible through a unified log-in screen under the partner’s custom URL. After logging in, Users can decide which Panel to go to, depending on their access levels.

As the name suggests, the Partner Panel gives access to the Partner level allowing to manage global settings, Accounts and Users.

When logging into the Cloud Panel, Users have to select an Account, if they have access to more than one. Inside that Account they then can switch between Projects and manage all cloud workloads.

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Getting Started

When a new Enterprise Cloud is created, only the first Administrator User is created with it. As that User you should first

  • log-in to the Partner Panel and complete your data as requested by the form that you’re presented with initially.
  • create more Users for your colleagues. We recommend that you have more than one User with Admin access to your Partner, to avoid losing access (temporarily) when a User loses or forgets their password or 2-FA.
  • create an Account (together with an initial Project), then switch to the Cloud Panel (which does not require logging out from the Partner Panel) and get an overview of the available Cloud Computing resources.

Location and Price List Settings

In the Partner Panel you can configure which Locations can be used when creating a new Project. In case you want to restrict that to certain Locations, it’s recommended that you do this early, before inviting more Users into your Enterprise Cloud.

Another thing that should be configured early are the price lists. In most cases it’s sufficient to configure one price list and assign it to all Accounts but it’s possible to create an arbitrary number of price lists and assign each Account to a different one.

If your Enterprise Cloud is only used internally for your company, you can ignore price lists. However, if you give customers of yours access to an account, always make sure to set prices correctly to contain your desired margin.