The new release for the Open Telekom Cloud has arrived. Users can look forward to many different innovations and improvements, particularly in the areas of security, services and management.

The public cloud offering now provides more IT security ex works because two more services can be encrypted: The Workspace Service and Mongo DB. This means that companies can now protect their digital workstations and scalable relational databases even more quickly and easily.

Setting up and operating backup and disaster recovery solutions in the Open Telekom Cloud will also be easier in the future: With the new Storage Disaster Recovery Service, systems and data can now be more easily mirrored across several availability zones. Information and applications remain available even if disruptions occur in one of the two zones.

This was already possible in principle: The Open Telekom Cloud, with its data centers in Magdeburg and Biere, has always offered the possibility of mirroring instances across two availability zones. However, it wasn’t as easy before, because it was only possible to set it up manually. The new Storage Disaster Recovery Service now greatly simplifies the process.

With the new Independent Quota Management, it’s now also possible to limit resources per tenant or project on the basis of individually defined rules. The background: Cloud resources are used in many companies across several departments and project groups. As a result, it’s often difficult for the IT department to maintain an overview and to control the resources used and thus the costs. The Quota Management Service simplifies this by allowing organizations to set limits for certain resources.

What’s more, resources from the Elastic Cloud Server, Bare Metal Server and Dedicated Host areas can now be limited independently of each other via Quota Management.

The Health Dashboard is another new feature of the Open Telekom Cloud’s November 2018 release: With just one click users can now check whether all the Open Telekom Cloud services are currently available. In principle, Deutsche Telekom guarantees 99.95 percent availability of the Open Telekom Cloud. In the future, users can see for themselves at any time using the Health Dashboard. It will display the status of all Open Telekom Cloud services online on a website. It goes live in December.

The November release includes a number of other new features and optimizations:

• More operating systems for images: The Open Telekom Cloud’s Image Management Service now supports the Suse 15 operating system.
   
• Volume Backup Service: The Volume Backup Service now backs up data on an hourly basis. In addition, "Duration" now provides an additional retention rule and thus the option of storing data permanently in the cloud as a backup, i.e. without a planned deletion date.
   
• Cloud Server Backup Service: The Cloud Server Backup Service can also now perform hourly backups. In addition, from December the service will support shared volumes.
   
• PLAS IntraSelect: With IntraSelect, the Open Telekom Cloud’s Private Line Access Service (PLAS) has now been extended by a Layer 3 connection option – for even faster connections.
   
• Tag Management Service: The Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), the Document Database Service (DDS) and the NAT Gateway function can now also be tagged using the tagging service.
   
• Cloud Container Engine: With the latest release of the Open Telekom Cloud, it’s now possible to integrate Bare Metal hosts into a container cluster. In addition, the Cloud Container Engine will be even more convenient for the user as clusters can be scaled using autoscalers, for example.
   
• Relational Database Service (RDS): The functionality of the PostgreSQL database can now be extended using various plug-ins.
   
• Data Warehouse Service (DWS): Now supports the KVM Hypervisor, MapReduce service cluster and data import from Object Based Storage (OBS). This enables a faster analysis of large amounts of data from different sources as well as encrypted data transfer.
   
• Identity & Access Management (IAM): Access Control Lists (ACLs) now enable even more detailed access control within the IAM to the programmable interfaces (APIs) and the graphical user interface.
   
• New dedicated host (from December): With the "General purpose (S2-medium),” the Open Telekom Cloud will offer another KVM-based dedicated host. This means that instead of six, a total of seven dedicated hosts will be available in the Open Telekom Cloud.