The DigitalOcean Blog

CEO's reflections on 2 years at DigitalOcean

yancey_spruill — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

As I approach my second anniversary at DigitalOcean, I have even more excitement than on my first day at DO.

The core of what makes DigitalOcean a magical company has stayed the same. We remain focused on our mission to simplify cloud computing so developers and businesses can spend more time creating software that changes the world. Our mission to serve you, our customers, has never been more important to us, and we are all-in for you.

We have made quite a bit of change in the last year to better serve you, we have improved our processes, we have launched new features and products to evolve our capabilities to support your growth. Importantly, we are laying the foundation to be here for you for the next decade, just as we have supported you in our first decade.

Earlier this year, we were able to provide our founders and early investors with a path to liquidity for their investment by taking DigitalOcean public. We are now set up with significant financial strength and a public investor base that supports the next phase of our story, and we will use these assets to heavily invest to support your growth aspirations.

Over the past two years, I’ve been so lucky to spend time with many of you, to get your perspective on why you came to DO and why you stay, and how we can serve you better. Your feedback has been invaluable to me, as we look to prioritize our initiatives to best meet your needs as you test your ideas and build your businesses on DigitalOcean.

Before ending, I want to acknowledge how hard life has been for us all these past 16 months. I’m proud that we’ve worked together to support our customers, despite the hardship, including in our own family. Earlier in 2021, we lost two beloved employees, Hollie Haggans and Peeyush Gupta, and I want to thank our team for coming together and surrounding their families with love. During this most difficult time - there’s been no more powerful demonstration by our DigitalOcean team that Love is at our core.

Thank you to our customers and our broader DO team, for making this past year so impactful and rewarding. I look forward to many more together, as we’re just getting started!!

New in DigitalOcean App Platform: Enhanced security, insights and DBaaS integration

moises-eskinazi — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Businesses are increasingly looking for ways to bring their apps to market faster. DigitalOcean App Platform addresses that need by providing a fully managed solution that helps you build, deploy and scale your apps quickly. You can deploy apps by simply pointing to your GitHub or GitLab repo, and App Platform will do the heavy lifting of managing the infrastructure, app runtimes and other dependencies. We’re thrilled to share that we’ve added several new features and capabilities to App Platform to make it even easier for you to manage your apps.

Securely connect your apps to Managed Databases as Trusted Sources

Whether you’re a developer, an entrepreneur, or a small business, securing your apps and data is top priority for everyone. By building a secure connection between your apps and databases, you can greatly decrease the likelihood of a security breach, brute force password attempts, and denial-of-service attacks from any server not explicitly permitted to connect to your database.

We’re excited to announce that you can now securely connect your apps built on App Platform to DigitalOcean Managed Databases as trusted sources. Adding your app as a trusted source creates a secure connection to the database which accepts traffic only from the app and denies other private and public connections, making your database more secure. Similarly, if your existing managed database has trusted sources enabled, the app is automatically added as a trusted source. This feature is available for Redis, MySQL and PostgreSQL Managed Databases and will be added for Managed MongoDB soon.

Here’s a quick video that shows how you can add your app as a trusted source for a Managed Database.

Gain better visibility into your apps with alerts and monitoring

When you’re building and maintaining apps, notifications about the status of your app can help you mitigate issues quickly. Clear visibility into the status and health of your apps also helps you become more productive, as you no longer need to mine logs to understand why your app is not working as expected. We’re excited to announce that we’ve added alerting and monitoring capabilities to App Platform so that you can get notified about the status of your apps and address issues quickly. DigitalOcean’s default alert policies will notify you about the deployment and domain configuration of your apps, as shown in the image below.

Default Alert Policies

You can receive notifications via email or Slack. You can also add new alert policies that will be triggered based on the conditions you set.

Creating new Alert Policies

Here’s a quick walkthrough of configuring alerts and receiving notifications.

Integration of App Platform with Managed MongoDB

In June, we launched DigitalOcean Managed MongoDB – a fully managed database as a service for modern apps. App Platform seamlessly integrates with Managed MongoDB, allowing you to choose Managed MongoDB as the backend for your app. You can either spin up a Managed MongoDB cluster when you’re creating your app using App Platform, or connect MongoDB to an app that you may have previously created. Here’s a great video that shows how you can use Managed MongoDB with App Platforms apps.

More flexibility for deploying your apps with support for monorepos

A monorepo is a single repository that stores code for many different projects. Developers often use monorepos to re-use code, manage dependencies, optimize builds, and efficiently collaborate across teams. We’re excited to announce that App Platform now supports deployment of different apps that are all in a single git repository (a monorepo). Each of these apps may be in a separate directory in the repo. This helps reduce the time it takes to develop and deploy apps, further making developers more efficient and productive. Watch this video to see this capability in action.

Integration of App Platform with Stackbit

Stackbit is a platform that allows you to collaborate on Jamstack sites, enabling your team to edit them visually instead of dealing with Markdown, git, or writing any code. You can take advantage of the benefits of the Jamstack, including better performance, tighter security, lower cost, and greater scalability, along with the convenience of inline visual editing. You can now easily publish your sites built on Stackbit to App Platform and take advantage of the fully managed platform.

We hope that you are excited about this release and will give App Platform and Managed Databases a try. Check out the docs and this session from our deploy conference for more information.

We also invite you to a DigitalOcean Tech Talk where we’ll be discussing and showing these updates in action.

If you’d like to have a conversation about using DigitalOcean App Platform and Managed Databases in your business, please contact our sales team.

Happy coding!

Moises Eskinazi

Senior Product Manager

Announcing DigitalOcean's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Report

yancey_spruill — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I am incredibly proud to share DigitalOcean’s first-ever diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) report that highlights our employee workforce data for 2020. We are committed to publishing our diversity numbers annually, as well as improving towards our targets over time. This year’s report will serve as a baseline as we make progress, and like all areas of our business, we strive for progress, because there’s always room to improve.

At DigitalOcean, we have a strong commitment to building a diverse workforce that reflects our values and the needs of our global customer base. One of our core values is We speak up when we have something to say, and listen when others do. This is about transparency and inclusion, and is our stake in the ground that our company is one where everyone feels welcome as themselves, can raise their hand and they are valued. We understand that the only way we can realize this incredible opportunity to serve the 130+ million entrepreneurs and developers, around the world, is for all of us to work together, regardless of our backgrounds, our business opportunity is simply too important and massive, to have a culture where all people aren’t contributing as equals.

As part of this report, we are committed to the following goals around diversity, inclusion, and equity:

By 2025 in the U.S., we will reflect the communities we serve in our employee population in both race/ethnicity and gender, using the U.S. census as our indicator.
Globally, by 2022 we aim to have a zero differential in sentiment across all employees regardless of gender or ethnicity when conducting our annual TIDE employee survey.
In evaluating equity, we will continue to ensure equal total rewards opportunities for all employees regardless of gender identity, ethnicity, location, sexual orientation, disability status, and more.

Why now? Our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is ingrained in our values and we are accountable to deliver on our commitments, including sharing our dedication and progress towards diversity. We want DigitalOcean to be a transparent and inclusive place where you know where we stand and no matter your background or experiences, you have a voice and you are heard.

A diverse workforce is vital for DigitalOcean to reach our significant potential. As I like to say, it’s not just what we do, it’s also how we do it. Valuing and creating a diverse team to serve our customers is a key aspect to how we will do it, and I am excited for us to release this report today, and look forward to updating you on our progress each and every year from now.

View the full report and more information on our diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives on this page.

-Yancey Spruill

CEO, DigitalOcean

Securely connect to Droplets with SSH key pairs using a new Droplet Console

harsh-banwait — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

The famous author Ken Blanchard once said, “Feedback is the breakfast of champions." This is something we truly believe at DigitalOcean, and we always strive to enhance our products based on customer feedback.

With this goal in mind, we are excited to introduce a new Droplet Console that will make it much easier to connect to your Droplets securely. The new Droplet Console provides one-click SSH access to your Droplets through a native-like SSH/Terminal experience. It also eliminates the need for a password or manual configuration of SSH keys. Starting today, we’re pleased to announce that the new Droplet Console is now available to all Droplet users.

Why you should be using Secure Shell (SSH)

Password-based security is notoriously insecure due to password fatigue and the overuse of passwords such as ‘123456’. Secure Shell or SSH is a network communication protocol that solves this by using passwordless solutions for encryption, enabling two computers to communicate and securely share data. At a high level, SSH works by creating cryptographic key pairs consisting of a public and private key, which are computer generated and stored separately to ensure their security.

SSH has become the default encryption protocol for many industries, but it was difficult to use SSH keys with DigitalOcean’s current Recovery (VNC) console, which is why we developed our new Droplet Console. The new Droplet Console is backed by an agent that security supervises the key pair, while also providing one-click SSH access to our users. You can see the full list of features below.

The new Droplet Console: More time saving, less time wasting

The new Droplet Console is for everyone who is looking to build fast, secure apps and avoid hassles with SSH access & usability issues.

In addition to easier SSH access, the new Droplet Console comes with:

Copy/paste text: Instead of typing lengthy key pairs and text manually, you can use copy/paste to save time.
Multi-color support: Multi-color support makes the console more useful and intuitive, and breaks the conventional standard appearance which is black text on a white background.
Multi-language support: DigitalOcean’s new Droplet Console supports multiple languages, meaning you can now type and view any content in any language that is supported by UTF-8
OS/images supported: Linux distributions (Ubuntu(16.04 - 20.04), Fedora (32 & 33), Debian (9), CentOS (7.6 & 8.3), CentOS 8 Stream, Rocky Linux and Marketplace images.

The new Droplet Console is available by default on any new Droplets you spin up. You can also enable it manually on older Droplets. Click here to learn more!

Check out this short walkthrough video that shows the new Droplet Console in action:

We hope you’re excited about the new Droplet Console. You’re welcome to spin some Droplets up right now, and try out the new Droplet Console – why wait?

Happy coding!

Harsh Banwait, Senior Product Manager

How managed web hosts are evolving for a cloud-first world

salim-hafid — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Few industries have grown more quickly than the web hosting industry as small businesses recognize the need for a presence on the web. The advent of platforms like Wordpress, Shopify, and Magento have made it easier than ever for small teams of web developers to build refined, modern web presences for their own business or to serve their clients’ needs.

Today, thousands of agencies, freelancers, and small businesses rely on these tools, many of them open-source platforms, to build exactly what’s needed without reinventing the wheel. Among the challenges faced by these small teams of developers is hosting, hence the years-long evolution of the managed cloud hosting industry. When agencies. freelancers, and small businesses want to avoid managing infrastructure, managed web hosts can provide a service by abstracting the many options provided by public cloud platforms. This empowers developers that don’t necessarily need to distinguish between CPU tiers or need to deeply understand pricing for their expected traffic.

Why Cloud-First?

As with all things software, hosting businesses have moved to the cloud to take advantage of the many scale, support, security, and cost benefits. By building on top of an established cloud platform, managed cloud hosts get the same fundamental benefits as those who use public cloud providers directly, and can then pass along those benefits to the end customer. By leveraging public clouds, managed cloud providers and their customers can focus on what they do best. For the end customer, that’s a focus on building atop Wordpress and its peers. For managed cloud hosts, that’s a focus on adding immense value atop cloud computing infrastructure that’s purpose-built for their core hosting use cases.

An added bonus: scalability and cost savings from public cloud providers are benefits that hosts can pass on to the end customer, resulting in a much improved value proposition that makes growing a cloud-first hosting service all the more compelling.

Considerations when building a managed hosting provider

Those looking to create a managed hosting business need to take several key factors into consideration. Most importantly, they must ensure the needs of their clients are met. Many end-users of managed hosting providers are building on Wordpress, as the most dominant content management system (CMS) available today. A typical end-user may be a small web agency with a team of a few developers all of whom know Wordpress inside and out. Key for that agency is (1) building on a platform that works, (2) building on budget, and (3) building on time for their clients. Managed hosting providers can meet these needs by building on top of reliable public clouds such as DigitalOcean.

Building on a Platform that Works

Agencies, to take a typical managed cloud hosting customer, need a managed cloud host that is competitive in all the ways you might expect: performance, ability to scale, uptime, and support. Managed cloud hosts’ clients are bound to have requirements around performance and expectations of the volume of traffic. By building for the cloud in a way that works reliably at scale, the host can confidently offer service-level agreements that reflect that critical capability.

Building on Budget

Second, and critically important to end-users is building on budget. For managed cloud hosts themselves, understanding the costs of hosting on some hyperscale clouds can be complex and the pricing model inscrutable. Similarly, for clients, pricing is a key requirement and where inscrutable, can pose a major problem.

The typical agency isn’t thinking about the cost of CPU and bandwidth usage or about the performance tier they need to handle the traffic they expect. They want those details to fade into the background with pricing terms they can understand and predict so they can come in on budget. For a managed cloud host to provide that clear and transparent pricing, their own costs must be predictable, which is why they must build on cloud platforms with clear pricing models.

Building on Time

Support is critically important in client services since many, like our typical agency, are choosing a managed cloud host in part because they understand the specialized language of hosted software. When they run into a deployment issue or a bug that is specific to one of these technologies, the managed cloud host has the knowledge and expertise to help the client work through that problem. Clients have expectations of when things will get done and having a support team ready to help is critical in building trust.

To build on time, and to ensure a managed cloud host will provide quality support to end clients, they need to know that their own infrastructure is taken care of. The managed provider must know they will be taken care of by their own cloud provider, from initial deployment or migration of their hosted websites, to ongoing support if any scale and performance challenges arise.

DigitalOcean for Managed Cloud Hosting

Whether you’re starting a new managed cloud hosting business or looking to take your existing business to the next level, your team has likely faced product complexity, unpredictable pricing, and inaccessible support from some cloud providers. DigitalOcean has a proven track record of building solutions that help managed cloud hosts scale their businesses.

WPMU DEV is one such customer. WPMU DEV is a managed cloud host that services thousands of small businesses. Their small team of developers wanted to migrate to a lower cost solution without sacrificing support or performance for their clients. Using Droplets, DigitalOcean provided the team with a clear, transparent pricing model that matched their needs, assisted in migrating from their previous cloud provider, and offered top-tier performance at a very competitive price.

DigitalOcean is the only service that balances the flexibility and scale of a high-performance cloud platform with the cost and support needs of a growing small business.

Contact us today to learn how DigitalOcean can help you scale your managed cloud hosting business.

Latest products and features at DigitalOcean: July 2021

pragya-pandey — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMT

In June, we introduced DigitalOcean Managed MongoDB - a fully managed database as a service (DBaaS) offering that simplifies the administration of MongoDB. This month, we worked on some key integrations with Managed MongoDB that help further accelerate the process of app development and reduce administrative tasks. Below are some of the key updates we released in July.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

DigitalOcean App Platform integration with Managed MongoDB

DigitalOcean App Platform is a fully managed solution that enables you to build, deploy, and scale your apps quickly without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. App Platform seamlessly integrates with Managed MongoDB, allowing you to choose Managed MongoDB as the database for your app. You can either spin up a Managed MongoDB cluster when you’re creating your app using App Platform or connect your app to a previously created MongoDB cluster. Here’s a great video that shows how you can create a dynamic app using App Platform and power its backend with Managed MongoDB.

Node.js 1-Click App integration with Managed MongoDB

Node.js is a lightweight platform ideal for building fast, scalable network applications in JavaScript. DigitalOcean Marketplace offers a valuable 1-Click App for quickly building your Node.js applications, and we're excited to announce that the Node.js 1-Click App now integrates with DigitalOcean Managed MongoDB. This allows you to automatically spin up a Managed MongoDB database when you create your Node.js app, further simplifying the process of creating your app.

Marketplace updates

We've launched new preconfigured 1-Click Apps in the DigitalOcean Marketplace to help you save time and remove the hassle of provisioning servers. These include:

Free Cost Management: Free Cost Management helps companies manage and optimize IT costs, and provides cost visibility and control over a cloud bill. The product supports multi-cloud scenarios - you can connect Kubernetes clusters or Azure, AWS, and Alibaba accounts.
NirvaShare: A simplified secure file sharing solution for your existing DigitalOcean Spaces storage. Share and collaborate on files and folders with your customers, employees, partners, or vendors, with fine-grained access control and security in place.
KubeSphere: A distributed operating system for cloud-native application management, using Kubernetes as its kernel. KubeSphere provides a plug-and-play architecture, allowing third-party applications to be seamlessly integrated into its ecosystem.
Appsmith: With Appsmith’s open-source, low-code visual development platform you can focus on solutions without ever having to worry about boring, repetitive tasks again! Build custom and complex internal apps, CRUD apps, workflows, admin panels, and much more on Appsmith.

Developer experience

Updates to DigitalOcean Command Line Interface (CLI)

We have released a new version of doctl, the official DigitalOcean CLI:

v1.62.0 - This release fixes a handful of bugs and introduces new flags on existing commands:

The apps logs command now supports tailing live logs with the --tail flag. This lets application owners select the most recent logs from their applications.
The --wait flag was added to apps create and apps update to block these commands until an application is fully created or updated.

Updates to DigitalOcean Terraform Provider

v2.10.0 - This release includes support for Kubernetes improvement policy and making create timeouts configurable for DBaaS and K8s clusters.

v2.10.1 - This release includes some bug fixes and docs update to add code fence to docs for MongoDB.

You can check out the release notes to get up to date information about product updates, and read about updates from the previous month here.

We hope you’ll give these new products and updates a try. If you have an idea for improving our products or want to vote on other user ideas so they get prioritized, please submit your feedback. And if you have any questions, please feel free to ask them here.

Until next month,

Happy coding!

Pragya Pandey

Sr. Product Marketing Manager

Multi-cloud vs hybrid cloud: Everything your business needs to know

ali-wunderman — Thu, 22 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Finding the cloud computing approach that’s right for your business

The rise of cloud computing has revolutionized business as we know it. The cloud has enabled businesses to focus their time and energy on building technology, rather than maintaining infrastructure, which has led to an innovation boom in startups and small businesses.

If you’re reading this, you probably don’t need a cloud computing definition, but here it is just in case: Cloud computing is the delivery of computing resources as a service, managed by the cloud provider rather than the end-user. This is in contrast to how businesses used to operate, namely by buying and managing their own software and hardware. Now that you’re committed to the cloud, the next step is knowing the differences and similarities between hybrid cloud and multi-cloud strategies, and figuring out which approach is right for your business.

To learn more about cloud computing, including its rich history, the various models and environments it incorporates, and the overall business benefits, read through this in-depth tutorial from DigitalOcean. If you’re not already familiar with DigitalOcean tutorials, they are an excellent and expansive treasure trove of information and resources created by DO employees and community members.

Right off the bat, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud sound suspiciously similar and are regularly used interchangeably. While both incorporate cloud services from more than one source, they do so in unique ways and refer to different cloud setups. Read on to dig deeper into this topic.

What is hybrid cloud computing?

There is one major factor that makes hybrid cloud computing unique from multi-cloud: Hybrid cloud computing incorporates private cloud infrastructure alongside public cloud computing providers. For a cloud computing setup to be considered hybrid, it generally includes a private component, such as an onsite data center managed and maintained directly by the business using it.

The benefits of adopting a hybrid cloud model include the ability to deploy in private IT environments, which can give businesses more control over their configurations and, especially for larger businesses, may lead to cost savings. Combining a private cloud environment with a public cloud for certain services can provide the required redundancy and reduce outages. Public clouds also enable businesses to scale quickly, so a hybrid model can take advantage of the scalability of public cloud services while hosting certain systems which may have specialized requirements to stay on a private cloud.

The definition gets tricky when businesses start to incorporate multiple public cloud services into the mix. When multiple public cloud services are working in conjunction with each other, that’s multi-cloud, baby.

What is multi-cloud computing?

A multi-cloud computing setup in its simplest form means that a business is using multiple public cloud providers to accomplish specific tasks or workloads; for example, one provider for analytics workloads and one for public-facing websites. As Raman Sharma, DigitalOcean’s VP of Product & Program Marketing, says: ‘The reasons given for choosing a multi-cloud setup are various - risk management, avoiding lock-in and reliance on one provider, compliance with regulatory requirements etc.’

Every cloud provider has its own pros and cons, and by combining several, a business can leverage the unique aspects of each. Typically this approach is taken to distribute resources in computing and lessen the chances of losing data or going offline. A multi-cloud setup is especially useful for small businesses as it enables them to optimize costs and services by choosing specific cloud providers for specific needs, rather than one larger cloud provider which may include services small businesses do not utilize.

Some businesses may leverage both a hybrid and multi-cloud environment, in which they use a private cloud in addition to multiple public clouds. However, if a business only uses one public cloud service in addition to a private cloud, that is considered only a hybrid cloud. The real differentiator here is that multi-cloud incorporates more than one public cloud.

Choosing the right cloud option for your startup or small business

Small businesses are the ideal candidate for adopting a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy. Many of today’s small businesses are cloud-native, meaning they are born in the cloud, and do not ever maintain their own infrastructure but instead adopt a multi-cloud strategy. As Sharma explains, “Most smaller companies adopt multi-cloud architectures almost by necessity. They have two needs: 1) They want to focus on building their apps and not reinvent the wheel. 2) They want tools and services that are best of breed in their respective areas, in terms of productivity and ROI.” Often, working with outside cloud providers is the result of going after their desired results on a budget that makes sense for their growing business.

There is a case to be made for going with only one service provider, but this risks being unable to access specialized technology that supports innovative ideas and startup-speed iteration.

When it comes to going the hybrid or multi-cloud route, the decision really lies in where your business’s non-cloud resources are located. If purchasing and operating an onsite private cloud is possible and preferable due to unique needs your company may have around security or configuration, then hybrid is the right way to go. However, if that’s not essential or desirable, then taking a multi-cloud approach will still bring the same benefits in terms of fortification against disaster, dealing with compliance, and having flexibility, but without the autonomy that comes with having a private cloud. For most small and mid-sized businesses, multi-cloud provides the flexibility and reliability that is needed, without the complexity and infrastructure investment required for a hybrid cloud setup.

Cloud computing is all about empowering developers and businesses to create and explore as many options as possible, and building a hybrid or multi-cloud computing architecture is just another way to leverage what makes the cloud so powerful. To learn more about DigitalOcean’s cloud services and how they can benefit your business, view our product suite here.

Building a developer tools business on a developer-focused cloud

raman-sharma — Thu, 15 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Software is not only eating the world, it has developed an uncanny knack of inserting itself into every aspect of this world’s functioning. This means that any improvements to how software is developed have a real impact on the overall productivity of the global economy. Tools that improve the efficiency of software development, tools that allow software builder teams to raise the quality of their software, and services that enable businesses to run their apps reliably and securely are more important than ever before. As a result, there is an increased focus on building products and tools that make developer’s lives easier and their work more efficient.

More developers are building more apps for more platforms than ever before

Given such a huge demand for software experiences in our world, it is no surprise that the number of software developers globally continues to grow, and is projected to reach ~29M by 2024. The number of platforms available for developers to build apps upon is also growing. Desktop, mobile, smart devices, servers, web, cloud, embedded systems, edge, and IoT are just some examples of platforms developers are building on today.

The growth in software development presents an opportunity for software builders who build tools for other software builders. Some of the challenges software developers face today include:

Developers need to write, build, test and debug their code with greater velocity. They need to collaborate with their teams and get feedback from their users. Most importantly, they need to continue to learn and skill up on the latest technologies and methodologies.
The apps they are building need to be composed together using building block services - databases, notifications, authentication, payments, communications, machine learning, visualization, and so on.
These apps need to be deployed using automated pipelines and once in production, they need to be operated using modern management and monitoring tools.
These apps need to be served from the most optimal locations to ensure low latency experience for their users.

These and many more requirements stemming from the deluge of software development have created a new breed of developer tools. These tools are coming not only from large software companies of the past, but also from newer, more nimble companies that hyperfocus on certain important but underserved aspects of software development.

The growing demand for developer tools and services

In the past decade or so, the developer tools and services business has exploded. Innovative developer teams have found new and more efficient ways to solve software development challenges, and many have also created new possibilities and scenarios. Github, Twilio, Stripe, MongoDB, and even DigitalOcean are only a few examples of developer-focused companies that came in and carved out a name for themselves in crowded areas. They accomplished this by focusing on the needs of underserved audiences and underserved scenarios, and by providing differentiated experiences to developers. In fact, online Q&A forums like Stack Overflow, online programming interview practice tools like LeetCode, and online community forums like DEV are also examples of services that make developers’ lives easier.

We can see this growth by looking at the Forbes Cloud 100 list, the annual ranking of the world’s top private cloud companies. In the previous iteration, ~20% of the companies included in that list were developer-focused businesses. Many others, though not developer products themselves, still provide extensibility points that allow software developers to extend the core capabilities of those products.

DigitalOcean: The ideal cloud for building developer tools

At DigitalOcean, we know a thing or two about building a business that is focused on developers. We do it by:

Making developers more productive through a simple product experience.
Providing rich resources around all kinds of system administration, programming languages, cloud computing, and other software development topics.
Giving back to the open source community.

DigitalOcean is a trusted advisor for those building developer tools

Given our popularity with developers, it is no surprise that other businesses who are also trying to serve developers find DigitalOcean to be an ally with a shared ethos and developer-first mindset. Those building tools for developers need cloud services, and DigitalOcean helps them every step of the way.

Businesses building developer tools on DigitalOcean include managed database solutions, edge computing platforms, serverless platforms, CI/CD solutions, API services, developer collaboration tools, online programming environments, among many others.

Bunnyshell’s mission is to allow developers to focus on building applications without worrying about infrastructure. It offers cloud-agnostic infrastructure management and application management, as well as DevOps tools for deployment and monitoring. Bunnyshell was looking for an infrastructure provider that allowed it to provide reliable services to its customers in a cost-effective manner.

"What we really like about DigitalOcean is the keen customer focus. As a company that serves developers, we want a partner that understands our customers and has a shared purpose. DigitalOcean not only provides world-class infrastructure but they truly get developers. This makes our job easier in terms of building management services for them.”
- Roxana Ciobanu, CTO of BunnyShell

We create opportunities for others to do what they do best

One unique thing about DigitalOcean as a cloud provider is our intense focus. We know where our strengths lie and where we need to rely on ecosystem partners. We believe the developer tools space is big enough for many successful businesses to not only co-exist but thrive, so instead of building everything ourselves we believe in nurturing an ecosystem of partners. These partners build developer tools to enrich the experience of developers building on our platform or on any other. In fact, we go one step further, and actively invest in builders helping builders through our Hatch program.

Section is a developer-centric, container-based edge computing platform that empowers application engineers to run any workload, anywhere. They achieve this by leveraging a global network of DigitalOcean compute resources to run their edge network, aggregating existing infrastructure to make it flexible enough to meet the performance, security, and scalability needs of all websites.

“With DigitalOcean, we get a low-cost option with great support and reliability.”
- Director of Education & Awareness, Molly Wojcik

Developer tools providers can start small and scale economically

Like most SaaS businesses, even developer tools and services products are faced with the problem of managing scale effectively. By providing industry leading price-performance packages, and especially attractive bandwidth economics at high scale, DigitalOcean provides a perfect cloud computing platform for developers tools.

Scraper API is an API that allows developers to build scalable web scrapers. If you’re running an online price comparison site and need to look up millions of websites a day, it requires a lot of infrastructure, IP addresses, browsers, etc. Scraper API manages this kind of platform which allows data-intensive companies to easily get the data they need.

“We had been growing 10 to 20% a month. And every step of the way, DO had tools that were exactly what it was right. We came for the simplicity and then, as we scaled, we were actually very pleasantly surprised by many things on the platform”
- Daniel Ni, CEO & Founder of Scraper API

Even developer tools builders need to build software efficiently

Even if your team is capable of handling all the complexity thrown at you by major cloud providers, it doesn't mean you should. As a business, ultimately you are rewarded for the value you deliver to your customers, and not for the heavy lifting of infrastructure behind the scenes. DigitalOcean handles your infrastructure needs with ease, enabling you to focus on growing your business.

Parabol is a remote meeting platform for developer teams embracing agile practices. With the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating the business world’s shift online and to digital meetings, Parabol saw weekly customer sign-ups increase by more than ten times. They were able to quickly and easily redesign their infrastructure setup to allow for greater scale using additional DigitalOcean Droplets and the Managed Databases offering. This allowed Parabol to move from hosting approximately 10,000 simultaneous sessions to several hundred thousand without disruption.

“As a founder, I didn’t want to spend time micromanaging infrastructure and doing XML sit-ups. When the pandemic happened and traffic grew tenfold, the robust DigitalOcean platform allowed us to scale seamlessly, without any disruption to our operations, so we could continue to focus on running our business.”
- Jordan Husney, Cofounder & CEO of Parabol

DigitalOcean is proud to be a developer-focused company. If you are also in the business of serving software developers, then we would love to hear from you.

Contact us to learn more about free infrastructure credits, robust training, and technical support to help you migrate your developer-focused tools and services to our platform.

Come build with DigitalOcean!

Migrate your workloads to DigitalOcean with confidence

pragya-pandey — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Cloud computing has unlocked many new opportunities for businesses. Leveraging cloud services, you get limitless access to key resources like compute, storage, and databases at a fraction of the cost of buying and maintaining your own servers. All this makes it easy to launch a new startup or scale your business on the cloud. However, choosing the right cloud provider to host your apps can be difficult, and needs may evolve over time. What worked when you started your businesses might not make sense economically or technically after a few years. Because of this, it's common for companies to move all their workloads to another cloud provider, or use a multi-cloud setup, in which different cloud providers are used for different parts of the business, to meet the changing needs of their business.

However, migrating to another cloud provider involves a lot of planning, is time and effort intensive, and comes with the risk of the migration disrupting the experience for customers.

'Simplicity in everything we do' is one of the core values at DigitalOcean. This is not just limited to our intuitive products, UI, docs, and pricing, but also extends to the process of migrating workloads from other cloud providers or on-premises environments. DigitalOcean is committed to making the migration process as seamless as possible, which is why we provide infrastructure credits and support to assist you in every step of your migration journey. Learn more about why you should consider migrating to DigitalOcean and the benefits of our migration program below, and click here to apply to our migration program.

Why migrate to DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean simplifies cloud computing so developers and businesses can spend more time building software that changes the world. With its mission-critical infrastructure and fully managed offerings, DigitalOcean helps developers, startups and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) rapidly build, deploy and scale applications to accelerate innovation and increase productivity and agility. With over 585k customers in approximately 185 countries, we continuously learn from our users and improve our solutions to better serve their needs. Some of the core benefits of DigitalOcean are:

Simple yet comprehensive solutions

Our products are simple, easy to use, and intuitive. This helps in accelerating the process of app development and launching your solutions to market quickly. Whether you are an entrepreneur or a small business, our offerings support the needs of a variety of customers. We provide a comprehensive portfolio of compute, storage, database, and networking products with an industry leading price-to-performance ratio.

The ability to scale up with confidence

Every business has unique needs and requirements. With DigitalOcean, you have the flexibility to choose from a wide array of IaaS, fully managed PaaS, and container based Kubernetes services to meet your needs as you grow. You can expand your business using our globally distributed data centers and a 99.99% uptime SLA.

Predictable and affordable pricing

The cost of starting and running a business is a critical consideration for many companies. With DigitalOcean, you always know what you will pay with monthly caps and flat pricing across all data centers, enabling you to keep costs in check even when you scale your apps. Our bandwidth prices are significantly lower than other cloud providers, making DigitalOcean ideal for network intensive apps.

What you can build on DigitalOcean

Our customers have used our platform to build a variety of solutions such as web and mobile apps, SaaS applications, streaming services and gaming apps. If you’re looking to reevaluate your hosting strategy in the process of migration, this video provides guidance on choosing the right deployment platform for your app on DigitalOcean.

How can DigitalOcean help migrate your workloads

Planning and executing your migration may seem complex. From identifying the right candidates for migration, to deciding on the ideal migration window, the key is to carefully put together a plan and involve the right stakeholders from the beginning. You can learn about some key considerations for migrating with minimal downtime in this Tech Talk from one of DigitalOcean’s solutions engineers.

DigitalOcean has experience in migrating workloads of all sizes from other cloud providers, and aims to simplify and accelerate your migration process by providing several migration benefits. These include infrastructure credits to ensure you aren’t paying for redundant services during the migration period, expert guidance and training through our tutorials and Solutions Engineering Team, and around the clock technical support. Larger workloads may qualify for hands-on migration assistance from the DigitalOcean team, while we can connect smaller businesses with partners to help with the migration process.

Whatever your needs are, DigitalOcean can provide the help you need to migrate your workloads smoothly. From step-by-step guidance to connecting you with experienced partners, we’ll make sure you have the peace of mind and minimal impact to your business during the transition. So, what are you waiting for? Start your migration now!

Latest products and features at DigitalOcean: June 2021

pragya-pandey — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

We just wrapped up deploy, our annual conference where we heard from DigitalOcean customers, learned what startups need to grow their businesses, and announced new product updates, partnerships and initiatives. If you missed joining the conference, you can watch the sessions on demand and learn how you can power your business with DigitalOcean. June was a busy month for DigitalOcean as we prepared for deploy and worked on critical features and enhancements that further simplify the process of app development. Below are some of the key updates we released in June.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Introducing DigitalOcean Managed MongoDB

We are excited to announce that DigitalOcean Managed MongoDB is now generally available. Managed MongoDB is a fully managed, database as a service (DBaaS) offering. We handle the provisioning, managing, scaling, updates, backups, and security of your MongoDB clusters, allowing you to offload the complex, time consuming database administration tasks to us. This offering is built in partnership with and certified by MongoDB Inc, which ensures that you will get access to all the latest releases of the MongoDB document database as they become available.

Read this blog to learn more about the benefits of Managed MongoDB and how it works. Watch this video for a quick overview of how to create a MongoDB database on DigitalOcean.

Support for PostgreSQL 13 in Managed Databases

We are excited to announce that DigitalOcean Managed Databases now supports PostgreSQL 13. If you’re using an older version of PostgreSQL, you can easily upgrade to PostgreSQL 13 for free using the in-place major version upgrade. This way you can test and validate the compatibility of existing database services on the new version before committing to the upgrade. For more details on benefits of PostgreSQL 13 and Managed Databases, refer to this blog.

Marketplace updates

We've launched new preconfigured 1-Click Apps in the DigitalOcean Marketplace to help you save time and remove the hassle of provisioning servers. These include:

flussonic: Flussonic can ingest, transcode and deliver video. You can launch your own service focusing on your business logic and flussonic will handle all video questions.
Mist: Mist is an open source multi cloud management platform. It provides a unified interface for controlling your resources across more than 20 public clouds, private clouds, hypervisors, container hosts and bare metal servers.
Sandfly Security: Sandfly is an agentless intrusion detection and incident response platform for all versions of Linux.
Znuny LTS: A service management and customer support web application with ITSM capabilities, process management, and many more enterprise features.
Chevereto: Chevereto is a self-hosted multipurpose multi-user, full-featured image sharing solution.
Hyperledger Fabric Cloud Lab: Hyperledger Fabric Cloud Lab is an effective tool to master Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain Networking Concepts.
Vodia Multi-tenant Cloud PBX: A multi-tenant cloud hosted PBX platform for providing reliable voice communication services to your customers.

Developer experience

Updates to DigitalOcean Command Line Interface (CLI)

We have released a new version of doctl, the official DigitalOcean CLI:

v1.60.0 - This release introduces an auth remove sub-command to simplify removing an auth context when managing multiple accounts. The databases user reset sub-command now supports resetting the user password for all database engine types.

Updates to DigitalOcean Terraform Provider

v2.9.0 - This release includes improvements to expose URNs for Kubernetes clusters, updates to nginx example and issues template.

You can check out the release notes to get up to date information about product updates, and read about updates from the previous month here.

Until next month,

Happy coding!

Pragya Pandey

Sr. Product Marketing Manager

Introducing DigitalOcean Managed MongoDB – a fully managed, database as a service for modern apps

andre-bearfield — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

MongoDB is one of the most popular databases, and it’s ideal for apps that evolve rapidly and need to handle huge volumes of data and traffic. It offers advantages like flexible document schemas, code-native data access, change-friendly design, and easy horizontal scale-out.

However, building and maintaining MongoDB clusters from the ground up can be a huge undertaking. Developers often complain that they have to spend their valuable time and resources on database management. Well, we’ve been listening and have some great news: accessing and managing MongoDB on DigitalOcean just got a lot simpler!

We are excited to announce that DigitalOcean Managed MongoDB is now in General Availability. Managed MongoDB is a fully managed, database as a service (DBaaS) offering from DigitalOcean, built in partnership with and certified by MongoDB Inc. It provides you all the technical capabilities that make MongoDB so beloved in the developer community. Together we have ensured that you will get access to all the latest releases of the MongoDB document database as they become available.

Managed MongoDB simplifies the MongoDB administration. Developers of all skill levels, even those who do not have prior experience in databases, can spin up MongoDB clusters in just a few minutes. We handle the provisioning, managing, scaling, updates, backups, and security of your MongoDB clusters, allowing you to offload the complex, time consuming –yet critical – database administration tasks to us. This empowers you to focus on what really matters: building awesome apps.

Benefits of Managed MongoDB

Easy set up and maintenance: We create the database clusters for you. Simply choose the cluster configuration (e.g., memory, disk size, number of nodes, etc.), and the data center in which you want to host the database. Follow a few simple steps and your database cluster will be up and running in a matter of minutes. You can spin up clusters using the cloud control panel, CLI, or API.
Automatic daily backups with point in time recovery: Data is one of the most important assets of an app, so it’s critical to backup your database. We take backups of your entire clusters automatically on a daily basis, for free. We also provide a point in time recovery for 7 days, that way if things go wrong due to human error, machine error, or some combination of both, you can easily restore the database as it was at any point in the previous 7 days.
Automatic updates and access to latest MongoDB releases: You get access to MongoDB 4.4. This is the latest release of MongoDB and comes packed with numerous enhancements like hedged reads, rust, and swift drivers. Since we have developed Managed MongoDB in partnership with MongoDB Inc, you will always get access to new releases as they become available. With Managed MongoDB, the updates happen automatically. Just select a date and time for the updates and we take care of the rest. This makes it easy to stay up to date with MongoDB releases without disrupting your business.
High availability with automated failover: If your database goes down, it can take down the entire app, leading to bad customer experiences. With Managed MongoDB, you can easily minimize the downtime for your database and make it highly available with standby nodes. Standby nodes add redundancy, so if for example the primary node fails, the standby node is immediately promoted to primary and begins serving requests while we provision a replacement standby node in the background.
Scale up easily to handle traffic spikes: As your app gains traction and the usage grows, it’s important to have a database that can keep up with the increased demand. With Managed MongoDB, you can easily scale up the size of database nodes when needed.
Secure by default: Since data is critical, it also needs to be secure. We encrypt data at rest with LUKS and in transit with SSL. When you create a new cluster, it’s placed in a VPC network by default that provides a more secure connection between resources. You can also restrict access to your nodes to prevent brute-force password and denial-of-service attacks.

The need for Managed Databases

DigitalOcean’s mission is to simplify cloud computing so developers, startups, and SMBs can spend more time building software that changes the world. While databases are a critical component to any application, building, maintaining, and scaling them can be complex and time consuming. For developers that are building apps for their business, database administration is often not a core focus area. But it’s quite common to find developers that write the code and then also roll up their sleeves to maintain databases. Such users would rather offload the tedious database administration and focus their limited time and energy on building and enhancing their apps.

With this in mind, we introduced Managed Databases a couple of years ago and are excited to add Managed MongoDB to our portfolio. With this release, DigitalOcean Managed Databases now supports the following engines:

Managed MongoDB launch comes on the heels of DigitalOcean App Platform, a modern, reimagined PaaS (Platform as a Service) that we released a few months ago. App Platform makes it very easy to build, deploy, and scale apps and static sites. You can deploy code by simply pointing to your GitHub and GitLab repos, and App Platform will do all the heavy lifting of managing infrastructure, app runtimes, and dependencies. App Platform, along with Managed Databases, helps fulfill DigitalOcean’s mission by empowering developers, startups, and SMBs to focus more on their apps, and less on the underlying infrastructure and databases.

How Managed MongoDB works

DigitalOcean provides you with various compute options to build your apps like:

Droplets: On-demand, Linux virtual machines suitable for production business applications and personal passion projects.
DigitalOcean Kubernetes: Managed Kubernetes with automatic scaling, upgrades, and a free control plane.
DigitalOcean App Platform: A fully managed Platform as a Service.

No matter which compute option you choose to build your apps, you can easily add Managed MongoDB to it. In addition to this, Managed MongoDB also integrates with the Node.js 1-Click App from DigitalOcean Marketplace making it a lot easier to build Node.js apps.

Simple, predictable pricing

Just like all DigitalOcean products, Managed MongoDB provides simple, predictable pricing that allows you to control costs and prevent any surprise bills. You can spin up a database cluster for just $15/month, or a highly available three-node replica set for $45/month. Click here for more information.

Regional availability

Managed MongoDB is currently available in the following regions:

NYC3 (New York, USA)
FRA1 (Frankfurt, Germany)
AMS3 (Amsterdam, Netherlands)

We will be making Managed Mongo available in other regions soon. Please check out the release notes for most up to date information on regional availability.

Join us at deploy, DigitalOcean’s virtual user conference

Today we have deploy, DigitalOcean’s signature user conference, which focuses on celebrating, educating, and connecting awesome builders from all over the world.

Check out the keynote session from DigitalOcean's CEO, Yancey Spruill, in which he talks about where we're headed as a company and shares some exciting product updates. His keynote will be followed by sessions from community members, engineers, customers, and other experts that are building technologies and businesses powered by the cloud. With live Q&A and an active Discord server, there’s ample opportunity to engage and learn something new. Click here to attend the deploy conference.

We are also launching a hackathon for DigitalOcean Managed MongoDB. Learn how you can participate, submit an app and get a t-shirt.

We hope you will give Managed MongoDB a try. Here are some sample datasets and sample apps that you can use to kick the tires. Check out the docs and let us know what you think!

If you’d like to have a conversation about using DigitalOcean and Managed MongoDB in your business, please feel free to contact our sales team.

Happy coding!

André Bearfield

Director of Product Management

How to scale your SaaS product without breaking the bank

raman-sharma — Tue, 22 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

These days, if you are in the business of software, chances are you are delivering or plan to deliver your services using a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. A combination of internet-based delivery, subscription-based pricing, and low-friction product experiences have made SaaS solutions valuable tools for their users, and an excellent vehicle for software builders looking to distribute their products.

These factors have made SaaS solutions ubiquitous; SaaS is the largest segment in the public cloud market, and is used to provide functionality ranging from personal finance apps for consumers, to productivity software for businesses, and even tools and services for software developers themselves to compose their applications and simplify their workflows. It is also not uncommon to find micro-SaaS applications being built for specific industries such as retail, job functions such as accounting or marketing, or tasks such as event management.

The best thing about this SaaS wave has been that it has allowed a new generation of software builders to build and monetize applications and participate in the digital economy. Previously, you had to be a big company with lots of resources, name recognition and distribution networks to successfully sell software products. Now, irrespective of whether you are a single person working on a passion project, a small team of developers in a startup, or a small and medium-sized business (SMB), the SaaS model enables you to express your ideas in the form of software and deliver them to customers anywhere in the world.

The unique challenges of building SaaS solutions

Despite the opportunities that come with the widespread adoption of SaaS products, software builders still have to answer key questions in their journey to building successful SaaS products. Understanding what customers to target, features to prioritize, how to price your product, and how to acquire customers are all critical questions to figure out while you are also doing the important job of actually building and operating the product.

Writing the code, testing, deployment, monitoring the usage in production, and ensuring that your apps are able to handle the additional demand when customer base and usage grows are all essential and time-consuming tasks.

Additionally, being able to test multiple ideas, pivot, and double down on the ideas that actually work is critical in early stages of SaaS development. Once growth comes, it is equally important to scale up without compromising on performance or reliability. Needless to say, all of this needs to be economically viable as well, since not everyone has the resources of large SaaS providers like Salesforce or Adobe.

Cloud Computing enables builders but also poses challenges

Fortunately, for the act of building and operating your apps, cloud computing can help take some load off your shoulders. Unless you have the scale and resources of Facebook, chances are you are not going to set up your own data centers to host the computing infrastructure that powers your SaaS company. Public cloud infrastructure providers can bring great value to SaaS builders by providing on-demand computing services with usage-based pricing. However, just like how the legacy software companies weren't built for the SaaS model, the early (and big) cloud computing services were not optimized for the unique needs of small SaaS building teams.

Smaller SaaS teams face challenges with large cloud computing providers, including:

Too many technology options

There are just too many options for tech stacks on which to build your SaaS - programming languages, application development frameworks, libraries, runtime environments, architectural patterns, and deployment models - and the list is growing by the day.

Complexity of cloud computing services

Even when you have decided on a technology stack, there is a lot of cloud vendor-specific terminology you need to learn and heavy lifting you need to do to build on the cloud, not all of which contributes to making your SaaS applications successful.

Unpredictable costs

The experimentation necessary in early stages of SaaS development, as well as the scaling of applications required during the growth phase, call for affordable and predictable pricing from your cloud provider. The last thing SaaS teams want is surprising and indecipherable bills from your cloud provider. Unfortunately, smaller businesses often experience unpredictable costs with cloud providers who are busy serving only the large enterprises.

DigitalOcean provides a simple, cost effective solution for SaaS builders

Fortunately, at DigitalOcean we have a laser focus on small software development teams, who are trying to build the next generation of applications. Today, DigitalOcean customers are already building SaaS applications which serve all kinds of customers.

We believe SaaS builders should focus on building apps that power their business, and not spend their valuable time on managing infrastructure. That is exactly what we have been able to enable through our intuitive products that are built for scale and reliability.

Vidazoo is an advertising technology company specializing in video streaming and serving. It serves video ads to thousands of websites and handles close to 10 billion requests per day.

“We are as much a data company as an adtech company. Our business relies on speedy and accurate data processing at massive scale. DigitalOcean provides us the perfect set of tools to operate our SaaS business profitably, while not making us feel the need to become full time system administrators. We plan to move a lot of our apps to DigitalOcean App Platform and other fully managed products.” - Roman Svichar, CTO of Vidazoo

We believe in meeting customers where they are. If they already have an understanding of cloud infrastructure technologies, they should be able to leverage that knowledge and get started with our products without any further ramp up.

Whatfix is an enterprise SaaS provider that offers a digital adoption platform to businesses. The company helps enterprises gain the full value of their investments in enterprise applications by providing real-time, interactive, and contextual guidance to users of those applications.

“What we really love about the DigitalOcean platform is the ease of use. We feel like we know infrastructure and can handle most of the configuration and management. What we needed from a cloud was not bells and whistles but efficiency and reliability. DigitalOcean provides us a platform to build our apps and then gets out of the way. Just how we like it.” - Achyuth Krishna, Director of Engineering of Whatfix

We understand that scaling while maintaining reliability of applications and profitability of business is important, so we provide robust solutions which minimize downtime.

Centra is a SaaS-based e-commerce platform for global direct-to-consumer and wholesale e-commerce brands. Centra provides a powerful e-commerce backend that lets brands build pixel-perfect, custom designed, online flagship stores.

“How do we enable our customers to create differentiated online experiences? How do we ensure their e-commerce apps stay up and running at all times? How do we scale on-demand when traffic grows or new customers come in? These are the questions that we ask ourselves every day. Thankfully, we have a partner in DigitalOcean that provides just the platform to answer those questions enabling us to guarantee 99.9% uptime for our clients.” - Martin Jensen, CEO of Centra

These are just a few examples of SaaS businesses finding success on DigitalOcean. We are constantly amazed by the creativity and innovation that software builders are utilizing our platform for. If you are interested in learning more about product updates, technical deep-dives and best practices for building SaaS products and businesses, please contact us to learn how we can help you get started.

Come build with DigitalOcean!

Looking to migrate your SaaS to DigitalOcean? Leverage free infrastructure credits, robust training, and technical support to ensure a worry-free migration.

Raman Sharma

Vice President, Product & Programs Marketing

Contributing to open source software: Kubernetes

jeremy-morris — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Are you interested in getting involved with the Kubernetes community, but aren't sure where to start? This blog post aims to help remove the ambiguity associated with contributing to an open source project as big as Kubernetes while providing some anecdotal experience to give you an idea of what contributing to an open source project such as Kubernetes can look like as a beginner.

By detailing my experience as a contributor, I hope to inspire you to take that first step to begin your path as an open source contributor. You can contribute to Kubernetes regardless of your background or years of experience. Everyone's contributions are an important and valued part of the open source community. Below, I detail my experience as a contributor and outline key steps anyone can take to become involved.

Why I started contributing to Kubernetes

Contributing to an open source project such as Kubernetes takes many forms: submitting code PRs, updating documentation, triaging issues, reporting bugs, improving tests, reviewing code, reviewing Kubernetes Enhancement Proposals (KEPs), and participating in Kubernetes release management. Kubernetes exists and thrives thanks to the countless hours spent by current contributors and future contributors like you.

I was first introduced to Kubernetes when I was asked to write a trade study on solutions a company I worked for could use to containerize our services and manage them with a container orchestrator. With the knowledge of what Kubernetes could do, at my next job I was able to start actually using Kubernetes when I noticed inconsistencies in the way some apps were maintained and operated, and suggested containerization as a solution. This allowed me to explore the Kubernetes repository, and while doing so I came across an issue that seemed like a good first contribution.

I had always been interested in contributing to open source projects, and felt that if I started contributing to Kubernetes I’d get more knowledgeable about distributed systems. Nothing gets you more experience with something than writing the code for it, which is how I became involved in Kubernetes and why it’s so valuable for others to do the same.

How to contribute to Kubernetes as a beginner

Here are some of the first steps to take to start contributing to Kubernetes.

1. Look for relevant documentation available for contributors

Typically, when you are a new contributor to any open source project, you should look for any relevant documentation for contributors. Usually, this is in the form of a CONTRIBUTING.md file or something similar. The README at the root of a repo is also a good place to start. Any project looking to foster a community of contributors should have this information easily accessible to new contributors. Another thing to consider is the means of communication that the developers on that particular project or sub-project use. For example, Kubernetes relies heavily on Slack and mailing lists: subscribe to the slack channels and email lists that interest you most, especially for the areas of Kubernetes you plan on contributing to.

As a complete beginner to Kubernetes in general, as well as a person with no experience contributing to the Kubernetes codebase, I jumped right to the CONTRIBUTING.md file. It’s well documented and pointed me right to the necessary documentation to set up my environment to begin development.

2. Search and filter for issues that interest you

Finding issues to work on: Once you have your dev environment setup you’ll want to find something to work on. When I first started, after I got my environment set up, I proceeded to look at the issues in the Kubernetes repo. In GitHub, when you search for issues for a given project, there is a filtering label that can be applied to filter for “good first issue” which indicates the issue can be worked on by a beginner. For example, is:open is:issue label:"good first issue" in the GitHub issue search bar would provide you with a list of all open issues labeled as “good first issue”. To filter even further on for a specific Special Interest Group (SIG) such as sig/network, you’d search for :open is:issue label:"good first issue" label:sig/network. From here I was able to find my first issue.
Making fixes for the issues you find: After finding an issue, you should let the maintainers know your intentions of working on it. The first thing I did was ask on the GitHub issue if I could work on the issue I found, which was a PR to remove all redundant new lines being passed into Logf() functions. This involved going through code in both test/e2e and test/e2e_node, finding the newline redundancies in calls to Logf() and removing them. This task was a good exercise in learning how to make a contribution to the Kubernetes codebase as it involved me making the changes locally, making a PR up against the main branch, and addressing review feedback.

Throughout the process, it was important to ask for clarification on the feedback that I didn’t understand. For example, the phrase “find and fix offenders” was confusing because I didn’t know what an offender was. But once I asked, I got a simple answer telling me that it means to remove all trailing lines throughout the e2e code.
Communication is key: Communication throughout the contribution process is extremely important and is critical to open source development. If you are stuck on a PR, not sure how to address feedback, or don’t understand the logic, ask questions. It’s best to over-communicate when it comes to being a contributor, including communicating when you need to step back from the project. Taking breaks is expected and accounted for in open source development, and communication allows for transparency and faster iteration on the work being done. By communicating clearly, you ensure everyone working on a project around the world is informed, saving time and minimizing items that get lost in translation.

As a new contributor, I felt unsure and confused when working on my first task. I find that becoming comfortable with not knowing the solution immediately is valuable in addressing issues you’ve been assigned and driving the solution forward. This doesn’t mean sitting in a dark room and solving it yourself, it means asking for help when you need clarification of the problem, when you aren’t familiar with terminology as I pointed out in my example earlier, or even when you just want some eyes on your proposed solution. This attitude of relying on teamwork and collaboration when needed will help you go a long way in open source contribution and in tech in general. Keep in mind, as a driver of a solution you’re supposed to be a collection of all the debugging and information you’ve gained in attempting to solve the problem while collaborating with others. There is typically no real deadline (unless communicated otherwise) associated with these “good first issues”, so feel free to take as long as you need making sure to constantly communicate progress on the GitHub issue and keep people in the loop, pulling others in to help as needed. If you end up discovering you no longer have the bandwidth to work on it, communicate that on the related issue and someone else will pick it up.

3. Stuck finding issues? Try becoming a Kubernetes release shadow

Another way to contribute is through documentation updates, which is a common way for new contributors to get in an open source project other than contributing code changes. One interesting path that I’ve participated in recently is the Kubernetes release shadow program, a program in which those new to Kubernetes release management can take part in to work on one of many different sections of the release. I worked on the Kubernetes Enhancements for 1.20. The task I was given was to review and track all Kubernetes Enhancements Proposals (KEPs), with the help of a few other shadows and a lead. This gave me a lot of insight into the KEP process and allowed me to work with quite a few contributors in the process. I highly recommend this path to anyone looking to jumpstart their network and impact within the Kubernetes community.

The benefits of becoming a Kubernetes member

Becoming a Kubernetes member is a consequence of contributing frequently and working closely with at least 2 different existing members with reviewing capabilities for a particular project within the Kubernetes repo. In other words, contribute a lot to 2 different areas within the Kubernetes project, and find a person you can work with closely from each. Over time, as you gain experience and have some PRs under your belt, ask these people if they could sponsor you to become a member.

A major benefit of becoming a member is being able to assign yourself issues and have more influence over certain areas of the code you’re working on. Another tangible benefit of being a member is receiving Kubernetes Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) as soon as they are recognized by the community. This was valuable to the DigitalOcean Kubernetes team as we receive information on these security vulnerabilities before the general public, allowing us to thwart undesired attempts at compromising our platform and ensuring our customers stay protected while using DOKS and other Kubernetes based products on the DigitalOcean platform.

The membership I possess also presents many opportunities, like being able to co-maintain the kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api-provider-digitalocean project and being able to sponsor a coworker of mine for Kubernetes membership. The value of Kubernetes membership has not only benefited me, but also my team, DigitalOcean, and the DigitalOcean community at large.

Common obstacles on your path to becoming a Kubernetes contributor

There are many obstacles that can prevent progress in contributing to Kubernetes or slow you down. The main hurdle is getting your first code contribution in. Due to the tremendous number of contributions on a daily basis and the limited number of reviewers, some PRs can sit for months or longer. The way to deal with this is to make sure you are contributing code that is actually needed. You can ensure this by tying it to an existing issue or creating an issue to get consensus from the owners of the code you want to contribute to that it is an actual issue, and keeping the approvers/reviewers of that area of code involved in what you plan to contribute.

1. Contributing code without collaborating with the community

Remember, drive-by commits may not get reviewed as quickly as you expect. Maintainers of a project can only do so much and hold so much context. It’s your job as a contributor to make your PR as reviewable as possible. Provide well-written, thoughtful descriptions for your PRs. If it’s a huge change, make sure there’s agreement on the change and break it out into multiple PRs as needed. Respectfully ping the maintainers in the appropriate slack channel if time has lapsed since you’ve made the PR and respond to comments on your PR in a timely fashion.

2. Not being humble or respectful as a contributor

Another obstacle I see in new contributors is ego. A lot of the time, an issue that is new to you isn’t new to others, so it is important to hear them out and proceed in civil discourse. Don’t go into any situation thinking you have all of the necessary information to proceed with a PR, and listen to others' input and take it into consideration when providing/updating your solution for whatever issue you’re working on. If people ask for updates and you don’t agree with them, ask for clarification on the suggestions until you both are satisfied with the outcome. The beauty of open source is the ability to collaborate with others and make iterations on a product to lead to a net positive for the project being worked on. Remember we’re all on the same team, and don’t take things personally!

Recap: How to become a Kubernetes open source contributor as a beginner

Find an area of K8s that interests you and find a “good first issue” labeled issues to work on right away.
Remember, over-communication is good.
Follow through on the task in a positive way.
Help others along the way, just like you would have wanted when starting out.

Key takeaways

After reading this blog post, you should walk away knowing how to start contributing to Kubernetes, how it benefits you and your career, how to become a Kubernetes member, and how to overcome obstacles you may encounter. In a world where cloud is increasingly popular, companies like DigitalOcean are always in need of people in tune with the cloud native community. Kubernetes is a very accessible way of getting to be a part of this amazing ecosystem built on love, respect, and collaboration with one another!

Introducing a new way to share your referral link: Powered by DigitalOcean badge

nicole-murdocca — Tue, 08 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

A few weeks ago we released a new feature for the referral program that allows you to embed a DigitalOcean branded badge onto your website, app, or content which links to your personal referral URL. Any time a user clicks on your badge and signs up for DigitalOcean, you become eligible to earn a $25 free credit, and there’s no limit to the amount of credit you can earn via referrals. This new badge is an engaging and visual way to share DigitalOcean with your network and earn credits while doing so.

Three benefits of the referral badge

1. Earn credits. By telling your network about DigitalOcean, you become eligible to earn a $25 free credit for every referral signup to support your current resources or kickoff a new project. Watch the video below to see how one of our Sr. Developer Advocates offset the cost of their invoices prior to joining DigitalOcean by using a referral badge.

2. Increase referrals. Embedding the badge is a great way to get more exposure for your referral link because it will be visible to anyone who visits your app. It’s a “set it and forget it” approach where you can add it to your app once and watch referral credits swim to you.

3. Share the DO love. Nobody can tell the DigitalOcean story better than our customers. Anyone who visits your app will see that you're building on DigitalOcean with the branded badge, introducing your visitors to powerful tools they can use to grow their own businesses. As you’re building your app, you may want to consider App Platform to quickly and easily build, deploy, and scale apps by pointing to your GitHub repository.

Why we made this feature available

We recently conducted a survey with a set of customers who participate in the referral program to learn about their experience and ways we can improve. A common theme among respondents was a desire to share their referral link with creative assets like a banner or logo. We listened to this feedback and unveiled three badge designs you can embed to your content straight from your DigitalOcean account.

One of our company values is “simplicity in all we DO”. We are always working to improve our customers’ experiences by eliminating complexity so developers can focus on realizing their dreams. Before launching the badge feature, you could share your referral link via social media channels or as a text link in emails, blogs, and other mediums. We recognized that we could add value by creating an additional way to share your personal link, and felt that an attention-grabbing visual option would make the referral process easier in order to drive more referral signups for you.

How the referral program works

Here’s how you can start sharing your experience with DigitalOcean and participate in the referral program:

If you enjoy using DigitalOcean, you can share your personal referral badge or link with friends and colleagues.
When they sign up through your link and add a valid payment method, they’ll receive a $100, 60-day credit to get started.
After their credit expires and they spend $25 on DigitalOcean, you’ll receive a $25 credit. The best part is there is no limit to the amount of credit you can earn through referrals.

Start sharing your personal badge to earn free credits

Your personal referral link, badge, and referral statistics are in the referral dashboard in your DigitalOcean account. You can access your referral dashboard by navigating to Account Settings, then to the Referrals page.

Choose from three different badge designs which we hope will fit the look and feel of your app.
Simply select the badge you like the most, copy your embed code, then paste it into the footer section of your HTML file.
When your badge is live, you can navigate back to your referral dashboard to track how many clicks and signups your badge is getting, as well as how much credit you stand to earn or has been applied to your account.

To learn more about the referral program at DigitalOcean and for further instructions about adding the badge to your app, you can check out this documentation. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them here.

Happy coding!

Nicole Murdocca

Growth Marketing Manager

Managed Databases now support PostgreSQL 13

mark-huber — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

We are excited to announce that DigitalOcean Managed Databases now supports PostgreSQL 13. PostgreSQL is arguably the world’s most advanced open source relational database, and it has been the bedrock of numerous applications for the past few decades. It became even more powerful with the release of PostgreSQL 13, which includes significant improvements such as space savings and performance gains for indexes, faster response times for queries that use aggregates or partitions, better query planning when using enhanced statistics, and more. Other new capabilities of version 13 include highly requested features like parallelized vacuuming and incremental sorting.

If you’re using an older version of PostgreSQL, you can easily upgrade to PostgreSQL 13 for free using the in-place major version upgrade. This way you can test and validate the compatibility of existing database service on the new version before committing to the upgrade. The upgrade process is seamless and it eliminates the need to manually move data between services. Plus, there is no downtime, so your database cluster remains available while it is being upgraded.

Check out this short walkthrough video that shows the in-place major version upgrade in action.

DigitalOcean Managed Databases enable you to offload the complex, mundane (but essential) database administration tasks like configuration, security, and updates over to us. This allows you to focus on building and enhancing your apps – not on maintaining your databases. Additionally, our Managed Databases now support Droplets with 100% dedicated vCPUs for your mission critical workloads. With the above-mentioned release, our current support matrix for engines and versions looks like the following:

We hope you upgrade your databases to PostgreSQL 13 and take advantage of all the enhancements and new capabilities that version 13 has to offer. Additionally, upgrading to PostgreSQL 13 from previous versions is free, so all the more reason to pull the upgrade 'trigger. If you want to try out Managed Databases, we invite you to sign up for a free account.

Happy Coding!

Mark Huber,

Product Manager

Latest products and features at DigitalOcean: May 2021

pragya-pandey — Wed, 26 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

After launching several key features in April, in May we focused on addressing customer feedback and expanding our capabilities to support more regions and new scenarios.

Here’s a snapshot of some of the key updates that were released in May.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Storage-Optimized Droplets are now available in SGP1

Last year, we introduced Storage-Optimized Droplets to support your needs for extra large databases, caches, and analytics workloads. Since these Droplets have storage directly attached to the hypervisor instead of being connected via network, they are ideal for workloads that require a high number of transactions with low latency.

Storage-Optimized Droplet in DigitalOcean control panel

We’re excited to announce that these Droplets are now available in the SGP1 region. See all the currently supported regions here.

New base images available in control panel and via DigitalOcean API

Fedora 34 and Ubuntu 21.04 base images are now available in the DigitalOcean control panel and via the API. Users using these images for their Droplets can take advantage of the latest improvements in the newer versions.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Marketplace updates

We launched many preconfigured 1-Click Apps in the DigitalOcean Marketplace to help you save time and remove the hassle of provisioning servers.

Redpanda: Redpanda is a streaming platform for mission critical workloads. Redpanda is Kafka compatible, no Zookeeper, no JVM, and no code changes required.
HumHub: HumHub is an open-source enterprise social network. Easy to install, intuitive and adaptable with countless free modules.
AutoPanel – Wordpress Automation: Create hassle-free Wordpress websites and save cost with AutoPanel - Wordpress Automation.
Speckle Server: Speckle is the open-source data platform for the architecture, engineering and construction industry. It enables you to freely exchange data between software silos and automate design and delivery processes.

Developer experience

Updated Floating IP API

We have updated the Floating IP API responses to better align with our newer API models. The droplet and region fields now use the same response models used in the /v2/droplets and /v2/regions endpoints. See more details on our release notes.

Updates to DigitalOcean Command Line Interface (CLI)

We have released a new version for doctl, the official DigitalOcean CLI:

v1.59.0 - This release includes a new apps propose sub-command and improvements to the apps spec validate sub-command.

Updates to DigitalOcean Terraform Provider

v2.8.0 - This release enables distributing custom images to multiple regions and surfaces better error to users if image import fails.

You can check out the release notes to get up to date information about product updates, and read about updates from the previous month here.

We hope you’ll give the new products and updates a try. If you have an idea for improving our products or want to vote on other user ideas so they get prioritized, please submit your feedback. And if you have any questions, please feel free to ask them here.

RSVP for DigitalOcean deploy 2021

Learn how to set up, secure, and scale your business at deploy, DigitalOcean’s virtual conference on June 29, 2021. With deep dives into new products, power use cases full of practical takeaways, and live interactions with speakers and technical experts, there’s something for everyone. Come for the content and stay for the community. RSVP your spot today!

Until next month,

Happy coding!

Pragya Pandey

Sr. Product Marketing Manager

DigitalOcean’s virtual conference is back! Join us at deploy, Power Your Business

digitalocean — Mon, 24 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

DigitalOcean is gearing up for another edition of its signature conference, deploy, with the goal of celebrating, educating, and connecting awesome builders from all over the world. Last year we succeeded in bringing together over 5k developers from all over the world to discuss important topics like building cloud-native apps and open source tools. On June 29th, we continue building on that success by bringing you another event that has you and your business in mind. This year’s conference is focused on helping small businesses and startups scale on the cloud. We’re excited to introduce deploy, Power Your Business.

The world continues to rapidly change and shift by the day, but one thing that remains constant is the increased adoption of online products and services. DigitalOcean is on a mission to simplify cloud computing and enable startups, developers, small businesses, and entrepreneurs alike to spend more time building software that changes the world.

Join us as we bring together great minds, great ideas, and the power of the cloud to take your business to the next level. Here’s a sneak preview of deploy and everything you should know about the 8-hour event so you can get the most out of your experience.

From products to pitches: Content that speaks to small businesses

Kicking off the event, DigitalOcean’s CEO, Yancey Spruill will talk about where we're headed as a company and also share some exciting product updates. His keynote will be followed by presentations from community members, engineers, customers, and other experts that are building technologies and businesses powered by the cloud.

The content spans a wide breadth of topics relevant to anyone who is a builder - whether you are building a simple app, a business, or a body of knowledge. From learning how to scale your applications to understanding the complex world of fundraising with Techstars, this event enables businesses to set up, secure, and scale with ease.

With live Q&A and an active Discord server that connects speakers and attendees one on one, there’s ample opportunity to engage and learn something new to power your business.

Make sure to view the full agenda and create a custom schedule based on your interests.

Come for the resources, stay for the real connections

Our community is bigger than us and extremely vibrant. Last year, we created a deploy Discord server, with channels dedicated to different DigitalOcean products and programs, as well as off-topic channels for sparks of creativity, fun, and general chatter.

We want to continue connecting and collaborating with you all in a remote and safe manner, which is why we’re re-opening the server. The deploy Discord is where all attendees can come together and engage directly with each other and the DigitalOcean team.

Starting June 15th, you’ll be able to pop into the deploy Discord and begin introducing yourself to the community. On conference day, we’ll open up all of the channels so that you can:

Ask your burning tech questions to speakers in the breakout groups.
Take a break and enjoy some live entertainment in the off-topic channels.
Snap selfies in the deploy photo booth.
Network with fellow attendees in the #introductions channel.
Follow the event on social and tag your experience with #DOdeploy.

Members of our team will be available throughout the event. Everyone is invited, from executive staff and engineers to product builders and content creators. The server will include special networking rooms, photo booths, and literary entertainment, all to ensure you have optimal access to meet and engage with fellow community members.

We’re so honored to have such an incredible community and we can’t wait to connect with each and every one of you at deploy. The time and details are below:

Date: June 29th, 2021 @ 9 am ET

RSVP HERE

#DOdeploy

We look forward to seeing you there!

Announcing new, consolidated site for all technical resources: docs.digitalocean.com

john-mulhausen — Tue, 04 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, we introduced a new website for DigitalOcean technical documentation that’s a comprehensive resource including tutorials, product details, sample code, references, etc. It was a significant effort that involved consolidation of key content that our customers leverage to build their projects and businesses on DigitalOcean.

A central repository of all technical content

The new website serves as a unified platform for:

Product documentation, formerly hosted at digitalocean.com/docs
API documentation, formerly hosted at developers.digitalocean.com
Support/Knowledge Base articles, formerly hosted at digitalocean.com/support

With all of this information in one place, we hope that the new site greatly simplifies the experience of using the DigitalOcean platform.

Evergreen API reference

Earlier this year, we introduced the DigitalOcean OpenAPI Specification. DigitalOcean API enables you to do just about anything you can do in our control panel programmatically. But as we introduce new services and features, keeping up with all these changes can be challenging. The DigitalOcean OpenAPI Specification gives you the confidence when developing against our API.

A great addition to docs.digitalocean.com is our new API documentation which is now generated straight from the source code and based on the new OpenAPI v3 spec for the DigitalOcean API. This new reference ensures that the API reference is evergreen and offers a downloadable YAML representation of the API surface for use with other OpenAPI-compliant tools like Postman and Swagger. This makes it much easier for you to design, build, document and use RESTful web services and APIs.

Fully managed and scalable - built on DigitalOcean App Platform

We’re proud to share that the new docs.digitalocean.com site is built on DigitalOcean App Platform, our fully managed platform to build, deploy, and scale your apps quickly. App Platform made it easy to integrate with our GitHub repo and ship our site at scale. Before, the docs team worked with our Ops team to maintain a build pipeline, Kubernetes cluster, and CDN configuration to ship our site, but by using the native static site functionality in App Platform, scalability, cloud building, and CDN performance is all built in.

Dependency on the Ops team to maintain build pipeline and deploy code to Kubernetes clusters

App Platform automatically takes care of building, deploying, managing and scaling the website

This eliminates the dependency on our Ops team and ensures we can easily scale our website to better serve our customers. If you’re a tech company looking to host your technical documentation on a managed platform, App Platform can be a great solution.

What’s next

We’ll continue to improve the content and address customer feedback. A popular request has been to share reference implementations for common use cases. We’re working on creating a ‘Samples’ section that’ll offer official reference implementations for popular use cases and common third-party integrations. We hope you’ll visit the new docs.digitalocean.com page and explore all the resources available. If you have an idea for improving our products or want to vote on other user ideas so they get prioritized, please submit your feedback. And if you have any questions, please feel free to ask them here.

Happy coding!

John Mulhausen

Manager, Product Documentation

Latest products and features at DigitalOcean: April 2021

pragya-pandey — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

April was another busy month where we focused on building new capabilities to help you achieve better performance, scalability, and efficiency for your apps. Here’s a snapshot of some of the key updates.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Premium AMD Droplets are now available in six additional regions

Earlier this year, we introduced Premium Droplets to support growing needs of businesses and offer faster performance and flexibility to choose underlying hardware for their workloads. We’re thrilled to announce that Premium AMD Droplets are now available in NYC1, SGP1, AMS3, BLR1, LON1 and TOR1. With this release, we now support both Premium Intel and AMD Droplets in all our regions.

Resizing between regular and premium Intel Droplets re-enabled in NYC3 and SGP1

You can resize DigitalOcean Droplets to increase or decrease server resources. Resizing options between regular and Premium Intel Droplets are now available in NYC3 and SGP1.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Managed Databases now support Droplets with dedicated vCPUs

We are excited to announce that DigitalOcean Managed Databases now support General Purpose Droplets, Storage-Optimized Droplets, and Memory-Optimized Droplets. Unlike the Basic Droplets, all these Droplet types offer 100% dedicated vCPUs and are ideal for mission critical workloads. The table below lists the various Droplet types supported by each database engine.

Read this blog to learn more about the use case scenarios. Check out this short video showing how easy it is to spin up database clusters with the new Droplet types.

We’ve been expanding support for this feature in additional regions. See all the currently supported regions here.

Marketplace updates

We launched many preconfigured 1-Click Apps in the DigitalOcean Marketplace to help you save time and remove the hassle of provisioning servers.

filecoin-lotus - Filecoin is a distributed storage protocol. The lotus daemon provided in this image is a Filecoin implementation.
Web-WordPress - Web-WordPress is the open-source edition of WordPress. The 1-Click App automatically installs WordPress and any dependencies.
QloApps - An open-source software that launches a multilingual hotel booking website within a matter of a few minutes that too for free.
CloudCasa - A simple, scalable, and inexpensive cloud backup service for Kubernetes and cloud databases.
OpenLiteSpeed Rails - Automatically installs Linux, performance web server OpenLiteSpeed, Ruby, Rails, rbenv, and CertBot.
ThePlanMinder PostgreSQL - PostgreSQL 12 server with a script to quickly create a database for The PlanMinder. With afw firewall and fail2ban configured and ready to use.
Invoice Ninja - The #1 open-source platform to create and email invoices, track payments and expenses, and time billable tasks & projects for clients.
twigs - A compact Linux distribution that helps you discover your cloud, container, source code, and many other types of assets.

Cloud Native

New capabilities for Kubernetes clusters

We introduced following new capabilities for Kubernetes clusters:

Use surge upgrade when upgrading an existing cluster. Surge upgrade is enabled by default when you create a new cluster.
Move a Kubernetes cluster and its associated resources, such as Droplets, load balancers and block storage volumes, to a project using the DigitalOcean control panel or doctl command-line tool. You can also assign a project when you create a new cluster. If you do not specify a project, it gets assigned to the default project.
Delete resources, such as load balancers and block storage volumes, associated with a Kubernetes cluster using the DigitalOcean control panel, API or the doctl command-line tool.

Developer experience

Introducing DigitalOcean OpenAPI Specification

We’re excited to announce the release of a new tool to give you confidence when developing against our API: the DigitalOcean OpenAPI Specification. The OpenAPI Specification (OAS) defines a standard, language-agnostic interface to RESTful APIs which allows both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of the service without access to source code, documentation, or through network traffic inspection.

New website for technical documentation

We’re thrilled to announce the recent launch of our new website for technical docs - docs.digitalocean.com! This new unified site serves as a consolidated platform for all technical resources such as product documentation, API information and support/knowledge base articles. It's built on DigitalOcean App Platform and a great example of a scalable site running on our platform. Stay tuned for a detailed blog on all enhancements we made with our docs pages!

Updates to DigitalOcean Command Line Interface (CLI)

We have released a new version for doctl, the official DigitalOcean CLI:

v1.58.0 - This release adds a --wait flag to the apps create-deployment command which blocks until the deployment is complete. By default, the registry kubernetes-manifest now generates a manifest that applies the secret to all the namespaces in the Kubernetes cluster using the DOSecret operator.

Updates to DigitalOcean Terraform Provider

v2.6.0 This release enables surge upgrades for Kubernetes clusters by default and adds a digitalocean_firewall data source.

v2.7.0 This release adds support for Kubernetes node pool taints and resizing load balancers.

You can check out the release notes to get up to date information about product updates, and read about updates from the previous month here.

Until next month,

Happy coding!

Pragya Pandey

Sr. Product Marketing Manager

DigitalOcean Managed Databases now support Droplets with 100% dedicated vCPUs for your mission critical workloads

mark-huber — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

A couple of years ago, we launched DigitalOcean Managed Databases to give you the ability to focus more on building apps while spending less time on managing the database. With Managed Databases, you can spin up PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Redis clusters with just a few clicks. You don't have to worry about database administration as we handle the complex, mundane – but essential – tasks like configuration, security, and updates.

Up until now, Managed Databases only supported Basic Droplets. Basic Droplets (formerly known as ‘Standard’) are the entry level Droplets in our portfolio and use shared vCPUs. They provide relatively fast performance and are suitable for business use cases that can tolerate variable performance. But since they use shared vCPUs, their performance might be impacted if they happen to run on a hypervisor with other particularly CPU-hungry Droplets.

We are excited to announce that Managed Databases now support General Purpose Droplets, Storage-Optimized Droplets, and Memory-Optimized Droplets. Unlike the Basic Droplets, all these Droplet types offer 100% dedicated vCPUs and are ideal for mission critical workloads. The table below lists the various Droplet types supported by each database engine.

Check out this short video showing how easy it is to spin up database clusters with the new Droplet types.

Use cases: Here are the typical use cases for Managed Databases with the new Droplet types.

Managed Databases with General Purpose Droplets:
If you are looking to run your PostgreSQL and MySQL clusters with dedicated vCPUs, look no further than Managed Databases with General Purpose Droplets. You get high performance with these Droplets, and you can use them for databases that power business applications like e-commerce sites and enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS) apps.
Managed Databases with Storage-Optimized Droplets:
If you’re looking to run large, high-performance PostgreSQL or MySQL clusters that require a lot of storage, then Managed Database with Storage-Optimized Droplets is your best bet. Storage-Optimized Droplets are the newest kind of Droplet provided by DigitalOcean and they offer substantial amounts of NVMe SSD storage. Unlike regular SSDs, NVMe SSDs take advantage of parallelism to deliver optimal disk performance.
Managed Databases with Memory-Optimized Droplets:
If you need a large Redis cache and want to minimize the spend on compute resources, then Managed Redis with Memory-Optimized Droplets would be a great fit. Memory-Optimized Droplets provide dedicated vCPUs like General Purpose Droplets, but with twice the RAM, making them ideal for memory-intensive business applications.

Pricing: The table below provides the starting prices for Managed Databases with various Droplet types. Check out our pricing page for detailed info.

Managed PostgreSQL and Managed MySQL

Managed Redis

Regional availability: The Managed Databases with various Droplet types are currently available in the following regions. We'll be adding more regions in the next few months. Please check out the release notes for most up to date information on regional availability.

We hope that you are excited about this release and will give Managed Databases with new Droplet types a try. Check out the docs for more information.

If you’d like to have a conversation about using DigitalOcean and Managed Databases in your business, please contact our sales team.

Happy coding!

Mark Huber

Product Manager