Green Screens Terminal Service v4.3.0

by Green Screens Ltd.

New release is here with increased usability and automation for cloud. In this version we bring TLS certificate auto-registration through ACME protocol (Let's Encrypt).

From beginning, Green Screens Terminal Service is built with Cloud integration in our minds. Some might say that there is no difference between local and cloud installation. But actually, that's not the case.

When running in cloud, several features are extremely important fro handling and orchestrating many product instances:

  • automatization
  • security
  • fast cloning (migration)
  • updateability
  • maintainability

There are always manual or better to say semi-manual tasks which must be setup by hand. Our goal is to automate as much as possible and leave only essential parts which can't be done through automatization.

One of the best examples is setting up a domain and enabling TLS Server Certificates for a running instance. Before registering security certificate, clients having its own domain has to register Green Screens Server instance to DNS. Second step is to generate and register security certificates. This process is done either manually through online registration process or automatically through ACME service. Later one requires scripting and updating tools to be set including access keys etc.  All these complicates the process and "kills" automatization.

By adding ACME security certificate auto registration, we can now easily prepare ready to use pre-configured disk images for use in Cloud. This allow us to have a new instance with public IP address up and running in less than a minute.

Only what remains from manual steps on Green Screens Terminal server is to open web admin page, add registered domain name and activate ACME. Green Screens Terminal Server system will auto-register security certificate and start a scheduled renewal task to periodically check and automatically update security license when it is about to expire.  

This is just one example showing why implementing ACME feature and many others cloud related features implemented into Green Screens Server Terminal are important and make a difference.