{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-blog-list-jsx","path":"/blog/19/","result":{"data":{"prismic":{"allFeaturedblogs":{"edges":[{"node":{"featured_blogs_enabled":true,"heading":[{"type":"paragraph","text":"Featured posts","spans":[]}],"featured_blog_1":{"__typename":"PRISMIC_Blog","_linkType":"Link.document","blog_header_image":{"dimensions":{"width":790,"height":395},"alt":null,"copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/6d8d81b1-971a-4313-b033-b4e125cb14a0_MondoDB-blog-header-790x395.PNG?auto=compress,format"},"blog_headline":[{"type":"heading1","text":"Introducing DigitalOcean Managed MongoDB – a fully managed, database as a service for modern apps","spans":[]}],"blog_post_date":"2021-06-29","blog_post_content":[{"type":"paragraph","text":"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.","spans":[{"start":22,"end":44,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://db-engines.com/en/ranking","target":"_blank"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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!","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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.","spans":[{"start":32,"end":91,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/products/managed-databases-mongodb/"}},{"start":230,"end":241,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.mongodb.com/","target":"_blank"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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.","spans":[]},{"type":"embed","oembed":{"height":113,"width":200,"embed_url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvHQSV7jnKA","type":"video","version":"1.0","title":"Create a MongoDB Database on DigitalOcean","author_name":"DigitalOcean","author_url":"https://www.youtube.com/c/Digitalocean","provider_name":"YouTube","provider_url":"https://www.youtube.com/","cache_age":null,"thumbnail_url":"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NvHQSV7jnKA/hqdefault.jpg","thumbnail_width":480,"thumbnail_height":360,"html":""}},{"type":"heading2","text":"Benefits of Managed MongoDB","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"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.\n\n","spans":[{"start":0,"end":28,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"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. \n\n","spans":[{"start":0,"end":52,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"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.\n\n","spans":[{"start":0,"end":56,"type":"strong"},{"start":148,"end":169,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.mongodb.com/new","target":"_blank"}}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"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.\n\n","spans":[{"start":0,"end":42,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"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.\n\n","spans":[{"start":0,"end":41,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"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.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":18,"type":"strong"},{"start":178,"end":189,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/networking/vpc/"}}]},{"type":"heading2","text":"The need for Managed Databases","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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. ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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:","spans":[{"start":33,"end":50,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/products/managed-databases/"}}]},{"type":"image","url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/87745cc1-1c5f-4463-b104-104b7fc30dc7_managed-databases-logos.png?auto=compress,format","alt":null,"copyright":null,"dimensions":{"width":849,"height":104}},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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.","spans":[{"start":45,"end":70,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/"}}]},{"type":"heading2","text":"How Managed MongoDB works","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"DigitalOcean provides you with various compute options to build your apps like:","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"Droplets: On-demand, Linux virtual machines suitable for production business applications and personal passion projects.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":8,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/"}}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"DigitalOcean Kubernetes: Managed Kubernetes with automatic scaling, upgrades, and a free control plane.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":23,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/"}}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"DigitalOcean App Platform: A fully managed Platform as a Service.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":25,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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.","spans":[{"start":166,"end":215,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/nodejs"}}]},{"type":"heading2","text":"Simple, predictable pricing","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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.","spans":[{"start":270,"end":301,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/#managed-databases"}}]},{"type":"heading2","text":"Regional availability","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Managed MongoDB is currently available in the following regions:","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"NYC3 (New York, USA)","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"FRA1 (Frankfurt, Germany)","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"AMS3 (Amsterdam, Netherlands)","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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.","spans":[{"start":86,"end":99,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/release-notes/"}}]},{"type":"heading2","text":"Join us at deploy, DigitalOcean’s virtual user conference","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Today we have deploy, DigitalOcean’s signature user conference, which focuses on celebrating, educating, and connecting awesome builders from all over the world.","spans":[{"start":14,"end":20,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://deploy.digitalocean.com/home"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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.","spans":[{"start":14,"end":69,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://deploy.digitalocean.com/agenda/session/552806"}},{"start":347,"end":384,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"http://do.co/deploy-discord"}},{"start":461,"end":489,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"http://do.co/deploy"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We are also launching a hackathon for DigitalOcean Managed MongoDB. Learn how you can participate, submit an app and get a t-shirt.","spans":[{"start":24,"end":66,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/mongodb-hackathon"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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!","spans":[{"start":22,"end":43,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://cloud.digitalocean.com/databases/new?engine=mongodb"}},{"start":59,"end":90,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://github.com/do-community/mongodb-resources","target":"_blank"}},{"start":141,"end":145,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/databases/mongodb/"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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.","spans":[{"start":120,"end":142,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/company/contact/sales/"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Happy coding!","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"André Bearfield","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Director of Product Management","spans":[]}],"tags":[{"tag1":{"__typename":"PRISMIC_Tag","tag":"Product Updates","_linkType":"Link.document","_meta":{"uid":"product-updates"}}}],"author":{"__typename":"PRISMIC_Author","author_name":"André Bearfield","author_image":{"dimensions":{"width":553,"height":547},"alt":"André Bearfield","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/fdc7c85186f0a850b04083e1d4306bd1c19772e8_andre-bearfield.png?auto=compress,format"},"_meta":{"uid":"andre-bearfield"}},"_meta":{"uid":"introducing-digitalocean-managed-mongodb"}},"featured_blog_2":{"__typename":"PRISMIC_Blog","_linkType":"Link.document","blog_header_image":{"dimensions":{"width":790,"height":400},"alt":"Droplet Console","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/710499ae-78cc-4179-afc1-15793637b200_DODX3727-790x400-logo-2.jpg?auto=compress,format"},"blog_headline":[{"type":"heading1","text":"Securely connect to Droplets with SSH key pairs using a new Droplet Console","spans":[]}],"blog_post_date":"2021-08-10","blog_post_content":[{"type":"paragraph","text":"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.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"Why you should be using Secure Shell (SSH) ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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. ","spans":[{"start":80,"end":117,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://cybernews.com/best-password-managers/most-common-passwords/"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"The new Droplet Console: More time saving, less time wasting ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"The new Droplet Console is for everyone who is looking to build fast, secure apps and avoid hassles with SSH access & usability issues.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"In addition to easier SSH access, the new Droplet Console comes with:","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"Copy/paste text: Instead of typing lengthy key pairs and text manually, you can use copy/paste to save time. ","spans":[{"start":0,"end":17,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"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. ","spans":[{"start":0,"end":41,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"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","spans":[{"start":0,"end":24,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"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.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":20,"type":"strong"},{"start":148,"end":159,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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!","spans":[{"start":132,"end":157,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/how-to/connect-with-console/"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Check out this short walkthrough video that shows the new Droplet Console in action: ","spans":[]},{"type":"embed","oembed":{"type":"video","embed_url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt7QihVuxiE","title":"Access Your Droplet Terminal Through the Web Console","provider_name":"YouTube","thumbnail_url":"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Qt7QihVuxiE/hqdefault.jpg","provider_url":"https://www.youtube.com/","author_name":"DigitalOcean","author_url":"https://www.youtube.com/c/Digitalocean","height":113,"width":200,"version":"1.0","thumbnail_height":360,"thumbnail_width":480,"html":""}},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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?","spans":[{"start":72,"end":103,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://cloud.digitalocean.com/droplets/new"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Happy coding!","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Harsh Banwait, Senior Product Manager","spans":[]}],"tags":[{"tag1":{"__typename":"PRISMIC_Tag","tag":"Product Updates","_linkType":"Link.document","_meta":{"uid":"product-updates"}}}],"author":{"__typename":"PRISMIC_Author","author_name":"Harsh Banwait","author_image":{"dimensions":{"width":600,"height":399},"alt":null,"copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/e83ff690-b20c-4d88-a2b6-57e562558cd6_download.png?auto=compress,format"},"_meta":{"uid":"harsh-banwait"}},"_meta":{"uid":"new-droplet-console-ssh-support"}},"featured_blog_3":{"__typename":"PRISMIC_Blog","_linkType":"Link.document","blog_header_image":{"dimensions":{"width":790,"height":400},"alt":null,"copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/588e28d3-d41e-480b-937b-8c3b19201f6e_DODX3568-790x400-Blog.jpg?auto=compress,format"},"blog_headline":[{"type":"heading1","text":"How to scale your SaaS product without breaking the bank","spans":[]}],"blog_post_date":"2021-06-22","blog_post_content":[{"type":"paragraph","text":"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.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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. ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"The unique challenges of building SaaS solutions","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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. ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"Cloud Computing enables builders but also poses challenges","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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. ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Smaller SaaS teams face challenges with large cloud computing providers, including:","spans":[]},{"type":"heading4","text":"Too many technology options","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading4","text":"Complexity of cloud computing services","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading4","text":"Unpredictable costs","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"DigitalOcean provides a simple, cost effective solution for SaaS builders","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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.","spans":[{"start":191,"end":217,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/solutions/saas/"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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.","spans":[{"start":205,"end":223,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/products/"}}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"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. \n\n“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","spans":[{"start":0,"end":7,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://vidazoo.com/"}},{"start":187,"end":583,"type":"em"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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.","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"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. \n\n“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","spans":[{"start":0,"end":7,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://whatfix.com/blog/driving-the-future-now-were-excited-to-announce-our-90-million-series-d-funding/"}},{"start":287,"end":648,"type":"em"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We understand that scaling while maintaining reliability of applications and profitability of business is important, so we provide robust solutions which minimize downtime.","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"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. \n\n“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","spans":[{"start":0,"end":6,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://centra.com/"}},{"start":233,"end":673,"type":"em"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"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. ","spans":[{"start":340,"end":357,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/migrate/?utmmedium=blog","target":"_blank"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Come build with DigitalOcean!","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Looking to migrate your SaaS to DigitalOcean? Leverage free infrastructure credits, robust training, and technical support to ensure a worry-free migration.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":156,"type":"strong"},{"start":0,"end":156,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/migrate/?utmmedium=blog","target":"_blank"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Raman Sharma","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Vice President, Product & Programs Marketing","spans":[]}],"tags":[{"tag1":{"__typename":"PRISMIC_Tag","tag":"Developer Relations","_linkType":"Link.document","_meta":{"uid":"developer-relations"}}}],"author":{"__typename":"PRISMIC_Author","author_name":"Raman Sharma","author_image":{"dimensions":{"width":512,"height":512},"alt":null,"copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/497b4b14-d192-493a-8b66-7ae176ba99f3_raman.png?auto=compress,format"},"_meta":{"uid":"raman-sharma"}},"_meta":{"uid":"how-to-scale-your-saas-product-without-breaking-the-bank"}}}}]}}},"pageContext":{"limit":12,"skip":216,"numPages":33,"currentPage":19,"data":[{"node":{"author":{"_linkType":"Link.document","author_name":"Stephanie Morillo","author_image":{"dimensions":{"width":188,"height":188},"alt":"Stephanie Morillo","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/88c5ec7b08345ce34cc82af6a32619bee69b1dae_stephanie_morillo-abc491ab.png?auto=compress,format"},"_meta":{"uid":"stephanie_morillo"}},"blog_header_image":{"dimensions":{"width":1536,"height":816},"alt":"Hacktoberfest 2017 illustration","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/6fccaf43fd30e94394badb950afb0e2b576db3ef_hacktoberfest17-blog-01.png?auto=compress,format"},"blog_headline":[{"type":"heading1","text":"Hacktoberfest 2017: The Countdown Begins!","spans":[]}],"blog_post_content":[{"type":"paragraph","text":"Contributors of the world, we’re excited to announce that DigitalOcean’s fourth annual Hacktoberfest officially kicks off on Sunday, October 1. If you’ve been meaning to give back to your favorite open source projects—or if you want to make your first-ever contributions—set aside time this October to start hacking. You can earn a limited-edition Hacktoberfest T-shirt and stickers!","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"This year, we have resources available on local Hacktoberfest Meetups (and how to start one), finding issues to work on, learning how to contribute to open source, and resources for project maintainers who want to attract participants to their projects. You can find all of these resources and register to participate on the official Hacktoberfest website.","spans":[{"start":325,"end":355,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"http://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/"}}]},{"type":"preformatted","text":"Just completed my FIRST EVER #hacktoberfest, meaning I made 4 pull requests on GitHub!! 🔥💪💪🔥 pic.twitter.com/WroFqbQJsg\n— Vicky Steeves (@VickySteeves) October 21, 2016","spans":[{"start":29,"end":43,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://twitter.com/hashtag/hacktoberfest?src=hash"}},{"start":93,"end":119,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://t.co/WroFqbQJsg"}},{"start":152,"end":168,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://twitter.com/VickySteeves/status/789601275310665728"}}]},{"type":"heading2","text":"The Details","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"If you’re wondering what Hacktoberfest is, it’s a month-long celebration of all things open source. Here’s what you need to know:","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"Hacktoberfest is open to everyone in our global community. Whether you’re a seasoned contributor or looking for projects to contribute to for the first time, you’re welcome to participate.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":58,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"Pull requests can be made in any GitHub-hosted repositories. As long as the project is public and GitHub-hosted, your PRs will count towards your participation.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":60,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"You can sign up anytime between October 1 and October 31. Just be sure to sign up on the official Hacktoberfest website for your PRs to count.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":57,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"Check your progress. Once you sign up on October 1, start checking how many PRs you’ve made via the checker on the Hacktoberfest site (make sure you're signed in first).","spans":[{"start":0,"end":20,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Over the course of the month, you can find new projects to work on from the Hacktoberfest site. Every time you visit the site, you'll see issues labeled \"Hacktoberfest\". Additionally, we’ll send registered participants digests with resources and projects that you can look at if you need ideas.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"The Fine Print","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"To get a free T-shirt, you must register and make four pull requests between October 1-31. You can open a PR in any public, GitHub-hosted repo—not just on issues that have been labeled “Hacktoberfest”.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"(Please note: Review a project’s Code of Conduct before submitting a PR. If a maintainer reports your PR as spam, or if you violate the project’s Code of Conduct, you will be ineligible to participate in Hacktoberfest.)","spans":[{"start":0,"end":219,"type":"em"},{"start":1,"end":12,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"preformatted","text":"This is awesome, nice number of PR tagged as #Hacktoberfest to review and merge https://t.co/yuEWSOwqNY thank you all ;) #DrupalConsolepic.twitter.com/0OToATCOzI\n— Jesus Manuel Olivas (@jmolivas) October 14, 2016","spans":[{"start":45,"end":59,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://twitter.com/hashtag/Hacktoberfest?src=hash"}},{"start":80,"end":103,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://t.co/yuEWSOwqNY"}},{"start":121,"end":135,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://twitter.com/hashtag/DrupalConsole?src=hash"}},{"start":135,"end":161,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://t.co/0OToATCOzI"}},{"start":196,"end":212,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://twitter.com/jmolivas/status/787000521248747524"}}]},{"type":"heading2","text":"Mark Your Calendars","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"With just four days away until Hacktoberfest 2017 gets underway, take a look at what Hacktoberfest 2016 and Hacktoberfest 2015 looked like.","spans":[{"start":85,"end":103,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://blog.digitalocean.com/open-source-at-its-hacktoberbest/"}},{"start":108,"end":126,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://blog.digitalocean.com/looking-back-at-hacktoberfest/"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Have you participated in Hacktoberfest before? If so, share some of your stories or tips for newcomers in the comments below. If you have favorite projects, or if you’re a project maintainer, tell us what projects participants should visit in the comments. And be sure to see what others are saying in the #Hacktoberfest hashtag on your favorite social media platforms!","spans":[{"start":306,"end":320,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"See you all on October 1!","spans":[]},{"type":"heading4","text":"Update March 2018","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"The last shipment of Hacktoberfest 2017 T-shirts has gone out. We experienced some issues with shipping this year, and we're sorry if you were waiting for a shirt and haven't received one. However, we're making changes to improve the shipping process in 2018. Thank you for your understanding.","spans":[]}],"blog_post_date":"2017-09-26","tags":[{"tag1":{"tag":"Community","_linkType":"Link.document","_meta":{"uid":"community"}}}],"_meta":{"uid":"hacktoberfest-2017"}}},{"node":{"author":{"_linkType":"Link.document","author_name":"Ryan Quinn","author_image":{"dimensions":{"width":240,"height":240},"alt":"Ryan Quinn","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/f9ea432b5990fac0de17b009eb0c7b3f2dc6885b_pasted-image-at-2017_09_15-10_25-am.png?auto=compress,format"},"_meta":{"uid":"ryan_quinn"}},"blog_header_image":{"dimensions":{"width":784,"height":418},"alt":"waves illustration with the word currents","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/46f6503e2a60d5a17286285d3596eef8db19d91f_currets_blog_header--1-.png?auto=compress,format"},"blog_headline":[{"type":"heading1","text":"Announcing DigitalOcean Currents: A Quarterly Report on Developer Cloud Trends","spans":[]}],"blog_post_content":[{"type":"paragraph","text":"The landscape developers work in is ever-changing. Keeping up means following numerous press sources, blogs, and social media sites and joining the communities they are involved in. We decided that the best way to truly understand how developers work and how the tools we build help them was to ask—so we did!","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"DigitalOcean Currents is our inaugural quarterly report where we will share insights into how developers work and how they are affected by the latest tech industry trends. To get the data for this report, we reached out to developers through social media and our newsletter, our community, social news aggregators like Reddit, and more. We collected opinions from more than 1,000 developers across the world and company sectors.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":21,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Among the many insights we gained from the survey, we found that developers rely on online documentation and tutorials more than any other method of learning about new technologies. Will this continuing trend mean developers have a wider or narrower base of knowledge (as bite sized pieces of technical content displace lengthy books)?","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Despite the tech industry’s important focus on maintaining a good work-life balance, only 12% of the developers we surveyed reported that they put the keyboard away at home; many opt to use their free time to write code for work or for personal projects. While developers are often passionate about their work, this result indicates that developers may be more likely to face burnout even when working for employers who make work-life balance a focus.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Here are other key findings from the first report:","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"Helpful Companies and Projects Make Developers Successful","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"52% of respondents said their preferred way of learning about new technologies is through online tutorials, and 28% said official documentation is their preferred way of learning. This appears to indicate that companies who invest in great documentation see a payoff in developer loyalty.","spans":[]},{"type":"image","url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/5a50857b7d92dcf5e2c4c09160381677acff6cb0_operating-system.png?auto=compress,format","alt":"Operating-system-stats","copyright":null,"dimensions":{"width":784,"height":418}},{"type":"heading2","text":"Linux Marketshare is More Than Meets the Eye","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"While recent market share numbers show Linux rising to just over 3% of the desktop market, this number may be misleading. Instead of simply asking our respondents which desktop they used, we asked which operating system environment they spent most of their time using. 39% of respondents reported spending more time in a Linux environment than elsewhere, outpacing both macOS (36%) and Windows (23%).","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"PHP and MySQL Still Reign Supreme","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Despite all the buzz about the latest and greatest languages and frameworks, PHP remains the most popular language among our respondents with MySQL as the most popular database. Meanwhile, Nginx far outpaced Apache as the preferred web server.","spans":[]},{"type":"image","url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/70bf3e3d3943fd64d058957e1863201c2bd7a7f2_lock-in-fears.png?auto=compress,format","alt":"Lock-in fears graph","copyright":null,"dimensions":{"width":784,"height":418}},{"type":"heading2","text":"Vendor Lock-in Does Not Scare Developers","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"With the rise of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS over legacy hosting platforms, vendor lock-in could be a concern. But with modern APIs and interoperability either directly or indirectly available through multi-vendor libraries, 77% of our respondents said that they’ve never decided not to use a cloud service for fear of being locked into that vendor’s ecosystem.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"Moving to Hybrid and Multi-cloud Isn’t a Given","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"According to Gartner, 90% of organizations will adopt hybrid infrastructure management by 2020, but the majority of survey respondents said they aren’t planning to use simultaneous cloud services in the next year; only 15% said they would consider their current strategy a hybrid cloud strategy. Just 10% of respondents said they would consider their current strategy multi-cloud, and 70% said they have no plans to implement a multi-cloud strategy in the next year.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"The full DigitalOcean Currents (September 2017) report can be found here.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":73,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://assets.digitalocean.com/currents-report/DigitalOcean-Currents-Q3-2017.pdf"}},{"start":0,"end":73,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"The tech industry moves fast and the cutting edge moves even faster. In order to bring you the most recent information, DigitalOcean Currents will be shared every quarter, highlighting the latest trends among developers.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"If you would like to be among the first to receive Currents each quarter, sign up here. You’ll receive the latest report each time it is released and will be among those asked to share your views and experiences.","spans":[{"start":74,"end":86,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"http://do.co/getcurrents"}}]}],"blog_post_date":"2017-09-25","tags":[{"tag1":{"tag":"News","_linkType":"Link.document","_meta":{"uid":"news"}}}],"_meta":{"uid":"currents-developer-report"}}},{"node":{"author":{"_linkType":"Link.document","author_name":"Olivia Melman","author_image":{"dimensions":{"width":188,"height":188},"alt":"Olivia Melman","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/97e5d587f18906403012119062c207ae04ec0d5e_olivia_melman-c8621a2d.png?auto=compress,format"},"_meta":{"uid":"olivia_melman"}},"blog_header_image":{"dimensions":{"width":784,"height":418},"alt":"people diving off of a boat illustration with words 'Creating A People First Hiring Experience'","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/2d9f4ac8f486df1725ab0423645456cd6dd40ed8_hiringexperience_blog_v2.2.png?auto=compress,format"},"blog_headline":[{"type":"heading1","text":"How We Created a People-First Hiring Experience","spans":[]}],"blog_post_content":[{"type":"paragraph","text":"This post is the first installment of a two-part series we’re publishing around recruiting and the new hire experience at DigitalOcean.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":135,"type":"em"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"When I joined DigitalOcean in March of this year, I was the 281st employee at the company. We’re now over 350 employees, over 120 of whom were hired this year alone, and our goal is to surpass 400 by the end of 2017.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"These numbers should tell you a few things:","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"1) We are growing, and fast. We’re bringing in world-class technical talent and our bar for performance remains high even as we increase hiring velocity. With that, the need for automation and process improvements is fundamental to sustaining and maintaining such rapid growth. And,","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"2) DigitalOcean is committed to being a “People First” organization. By investing in the People team upfront as a critical, proactive resource, DigitalOcean has recognized that showing love to both our customers and employees is essential to our success as a business.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Fusing together these two takeaways, the need for a Recruiting Operations function becomes critical, especially in today's HR-tech landscape. The war for talent is real, leaving recruiters with limited bandwidth to focus on process improvements and a constant sense of urgency to make great hires. I joined DigitalOcean from LinkedIn, where I worked as a Customer Success Manager helping Enterprise Recruiting Teams (similar in size and scale to DO) optimize their LinkedIn solutions to hire most effectively. When I was given the chance to expand upon this experience by coming in-house to DO, I was inspired by the opportunity to add value to a growing company in brand new ways.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Having a dedicated resource to ensure we are using best practices, understanding the analytics behind our pipeline performance, evaluating recruitment tools and implementing data-driven recruiting strategies enables a company like ours to grow and scale. So, while my role is largely focused on increasing hiring efficiency and implementing technologies and tools to automate, my true passion is fueled by the experiences I’m impacting for everyone throughout the recruiting process.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Experience matters at DO—from user, to candidate, to employee. A study from CareerBuilder showed that “nearly 4 in 5 candidates (78%) say the overall candidate experience they receive is an indicator of how a company values its people.” In recruiting, a positive experience is intertwined with anticipating what’s going to happen next, and the candidate should feel as respected, valued, and loved as any employee. That includes proactive communication about the process and why it’s important. We believe it’s important to be transparent about what you can expect here at DigitalOcean, in any capacity.","spans":[{"start":65,"end":89,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://resources.careerbuilder.com/guides/candidate-experience-guide?utm_source=ths_insightsfortastrategy&utm_medium=blog&utm_content=candidateexperience2017&utm_campaign=thehiringsitearticles_b2b"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"The nature of Recruiting Ops impacts several groups. In this post, I’ll touch on on the candidate and employee experiences.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"Candidates","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We’ve all been a candidate before. Anyone who has ever looked for a job has experienced the black hole of “I applied, now what?”. At DO, you don’t have to wonder, wait, and then wait some more. Humanizing the candidate experience is key to fostering a positive one, so here’s what we share with every applicant when they apply: \n","spans":[]},{"type":"image","url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/3816a79ff35c7ae6982f3b12f908857d55874082_screen-shot-2017-05-31-at-10.25.18-am-1.png?auto=compress,format","alt":"email screenshot","copyright":null,"dimensions":{"width":653,"height":1088}},{"type":"paragraph","text":"In addition, we believe both candidates and Recruiters win when the recruiting process is more personalized. We’ve replaced the traditional “Recruiter Phone Call” first step with a video chat over Google Hangout. By encouraging candidates to participate in a Google Hangout, our Recruiters can get a truer sense of the candidate, and the candidate a truer sense of who their partner will be throughout the remainder of their interview experience. And because we’re a highly remote-friendly organization, we include video conferencing as a normal part of how we connect on a daily basis.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We want to be transparent about what we’re working on internally and how we’re measuring the success of our well-oiled recruiting machine. A few specific metrics we’re monitoring are time to hire, length of candidate journey, and new hire engagement scores. Here’s why and how:","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"Time to Hire: We measure time to hire as the number of days between req approval (which kickstarts the hiring process) to offer accepted. Industry best practice is ~60 days, and we’re working tirelessly to beat that!","spans":[{"start":0,"end":12,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"Length of Journey: We want to ensure a quick and transparent process for our candidates, so that they’re not left waiting for information. We consider length of journey as the days between the first candidate interaction to when the hiring decision is made. Our goal is to ensure no candidate hangs around waiting for a decision for more than 30 days from their first interaction.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":17,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"New Hire Engagement: When a candidate becomes a new hire, it’s equally as important that their experience remains positive and their expectations are met. We invite all new hires to review us on Glassdoor with feedback on their interview and employment experiences (week 1 and 90 days, respectively). We track these reviews closely and make adjustments to onboarding as constructive feedback is shared. Our VP of People and Director of Talent Acquisition read each piece of feedback on Glassdoor and try to respond thoughtfully to each one. To eliminate participation bias, we also distribute internal surveys through Culture Amp called The Tide. (Learn more about those here!)","spans":[{"start":0,"end":19,"type":"strong"},{"start":650,"end":678,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.cultureamp.com/customers/case-studies/digital-ocean.html"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"From our DigitalOcean Neighborhood Guide for non-local candidates joining us onsite to interview, to our employee handbook (available to the public soon), we offer resources to ease the candidate journey every step of the way. Stay tuned for that employee handbook.","spans":[{"start":9,"end":40,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"http://bit.ly/dohqguide"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"In the meantime, watch our short culture video (produced by The Muse), which gives a sneak peak into what it’s like to work here. You’ll get to see our office, and get a sense of DO’s culture via interviews with some of our most talented employees. By partnering with awesome companies like The Muse, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and more, I’m able to help showcase the amazing work our teams are doing and the experiences our employees are having. Our LinkedIn page introduces candidates to our leadership team, and there you can also read employee testimonials and employee-written blog posts. We also share product and content updates on LinkedIn to tell our story to users and candidates alike in real-time.","spans":[{"start":17,"end":46,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://vimeo.com/226833541/12ae084367"}},{"start":311,"end":320,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-DigitalOcean-EI_IE823482.11,23.htm"}},{"start":441,"end":458,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.linkedin.com/company/digitalocean"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We’re actively building tools to give folks outside of DigitalOcean a better understanding of what the employee experience is like here in hopes that they—or you!—will want to join us (we're hiring!).","spans":[{"start":177,"end":200,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"http://grnh.se/1eupst1"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Olivia Melman joined DigitalOcean in March 2017 as the People team’s first Program Manager. She is heavily focused on automation and collaboration within the full-cycle recruitment process, strengthening external partnerships to promote DO’s employment brand, and leveraging data leveraging data to drive Recruiting strategy.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":325,"type":"em"}]}],"blog_post_date":"2017-09-06","tags":[{"tag1":{"tag":"Culture","_linkType":"Link.document","_meta":{"uid":"culture"}}}],"_meta":{"uid":"people-first-hiring-experience"}}},{"node":{"author":{"_linkType":"Link.document","author_name":"Alejandro (Alex) Jaimes","author_image":{"dimensions":{"width":1600,"height":1067},"alt":"Alejandro (Alex) Jaimes","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/2ef201f3af242c6dface5c525637e5d45cac7050_ldv_20150519_0485.jpg?auto=compress,format"},"_meta":{"uid":"alejandro_alex_jaimes"}},"blog_header_image":{"dimensions":{"width":785,"height":418},"alt":"AI letter illustration","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/3dc3d453e2c54f4c2ef5be82c48a6b38ca07a854_ai_2_blog_kasia.png?auto=compress,format"},"blog_headline":[{"type":"heading1","text":"How Data and Models Feed Computing","spans":[]}],"blog_post_content":[{"type":"paragraph","text":"This post is the second in a three-part series on artificial intelligence by DigitalOcean’s Head of R&D, Alejandro (Alex) Jaimes. (Click here to read the first installment.)","spans":[{"start":0,"end":173,"type":"em"},{"start":131,"end":171,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://blog.digitalocean.com/the-state-of-ai/"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Not every company, nor every developer will have the resources or the time to collect vast amounts of data to create models from scratch. Fortunately, the same repetition that I described in my last post occurs within and across industries. Because of this, particularly with deep learning, we’ve seen two very important trends:","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"(1) creation and sharing of public data to build models; and","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"(2) sharing of the models themselves even when the data is not released.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"While the companies that have the most data may never release it, such data is not a requirement for every problem. It’s clear, however, that teams that leverage existing public models and combine public and proprietary datasets will have a competitive advantage. They must be “smart” about how they use and leverage the data they are able to collect, again with an AI mindset and strategy in mind.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"Supervised and Unsupervised Learning","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"The majority of successes in AI so far have been based on supervised learning, in which machine learning algorithms are fed with labeled data—labeled data refers to a sample group that can be identified with a meaningful label or tag—versus unlabeled data. Labeling data is expensive, time consuming, and difficult (e.g., maintaining the desired quality, dealing with subjectivity, etc). For this reason, the ideal algorithms will be “unsupervised”—in other words, learning from unlabeled data. While promising, those algorithms have not shown the success levels needed to have the desired impact. Teams should then rely on creative strategies to leverage existing datasets, and combine supervised and unsupervised methods for now.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"A number of companies offer labeling and data collection services. But there are ways to use algorithms to simplify the manual labeling process (e.g., with a “small” dataset one can create an algorithm that labels a much larger unlabeled dataset, so that humans have to correct errors made by the algorithm instead of labeling all of the data from scratch), or to create synthetic datasets (e.g., by using algorithms to generate “fake” data that looks like the original data). The bottom line is that no matter what size the project is, there are almost always alternatives to either obtain new data or augment existing datasets.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"AI as a Service","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Generally, significant efforts are required in developing models to perform tasks in accurate, efficient ways. For that reason, many companies and teams focus on specific verticals—building functionalities that are limited, but that work well in practice (versus the ideal of building a “human-like” AI capable of doing many things at once).","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"In some cases, those functionalities can be applied across domains. Developing a speech recognition system from scratch, for example, is a major effort, and most companies and teams that need it would be better off using a service than building it from scratch.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"As the AI industry advances, we can expect to see more and more of those functionalities coming from specific vendors and open source initiatives, similar to the way software is built today: combinations of libraries, APIs, and open source and commercial components, coupled with custom software for specific applications.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"In addition, given the nature of AI, building an infrastructure that quickly scales as needs shift is a major challenge. This implies that running AI will mostly happen on the cloud. Note that in the new AI computing paradigm, growing datasets, experimentation, and constant “tweaking” of models is a critical component.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Therefore, AI will be used as a cloud-based service for many applications. That’s a natural progression and in many ways leads to the commoditization of AI, which will lead to greater efficiency, opportunities, innovation, and positive economic impact. In our next installment, we’ll explore what all of this means for today’s developers.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"In line with the trends we’re seeing in research and industry, we’re releasing a powerful set of tools that allow developers to easily re-use existing models, work with large quantities of data, and easily scale, on the cloud. We encourage you to take a look at our machine learning one-click. What other tools or functionalities would you be interested in having us provide? Feel free to leave feedback in the comments section below.","spans":[{"start":266,"end":292,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-the-machine-learning-one-click-install-image-on-digitalocean"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"*Alejandro (Alex) Jaimes is Head of R&D at DigitalOcean. Alex enjoys scuba diving and started coding in Assembly when he was 12. In spite of his fear of heights, he's climbed a peak or two, gone paragliding, and ridden a bull in a rodeo. He's been a startup CTO and advisor, and has held leadership positions at Yahoo, Telefonica, IDIAP, FujiXerox, and IBM TJ Watson, among others. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Learn more by visiting his personal website or LinkedIn profile. Find him on Twitter: @tinybigdata.*","spans":[{"start":86,"end":98,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"twitter.com/tinybigdata"}}]}],"blog_post_date":"2017-08-31","tags":[{"tag1":{"tag":"Engineering","_linkType":"Link.document","_meta":{"uid":"engineering"}}}],"_meta":{"uid":"how-data-and-models-feed-computing"}}},{"node":{"author":{"_linkType":"Link.document","author_name":"Dave (Dizzy) Smith","author_image":{"dimensions":{"width":400,"height":400},"alt":"Dave (Dizzy) Smith","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/bf8843f291543bd23476b7d50ce843257205a220_wpymhhwq_400x400.jpg?auto=compress,format"},"_meta":{"uid":"dave_dizzy_smith"}},"blog_header_image":{"dimensions":{"width":784,"height":418},"alt":"abstract illustration of sending chat messages","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/03a714fa1cf1fd8b0f53e7e928818e9ed996e640_distributed-teams_blog.png?auto=compress,format"},"blog_headline":[{"type":"heading1","text":"How to Manage, Build, and Nurture Distributed Teams","spans":[]}],"blog_post_content":[{"type":"paragraph","text":"This blog post was adapted from Dizzy’s OSCON 2017 talk, “Managing, Nurturing, and Building Distributed Teams”.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":111,"type":"em"},{"start":58,"end":109,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qI0tJ6Edhw&feature=youtu.be"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"There’s a lot of talk out there about what worked for one company or another when it comes to distributed teams. The challenge we all face is how to make successful, distributed teams reproducible. Lots of companies have made it work—by luck or by force of personality. I, however, want to engineer it using effective communication.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"And at the end of my life, I want to look back and know I made the world a tiny bit better for people who create amazing things. This is the work of a manager—to create environments in which people do the best work of their lives. It is especially important in a distributed team since you can’t rely on personality or stage presence; you must be disciplined and focused, and work deliberately to construct these environments. Most importantly, you have to understand the forces you face and how to counteract them.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"How Distributed Teams Differ From Other Teams","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"A distributed team can be succinctly summed up as: “People + Work - Location; United by purpose”.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"There are lots of implications related to the removal of location. Without location, managers have to find something more fundamental to bind people together. As managers, we must consider how to unite distributed teams by rallying them around a collective purpose. There are forces at work making it difficult for distributed teams to unite—and stay united—around any purpose. Thankfully, there are ways to counteract these forces, too.","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"The Challenge: Navigating Space and Time. When we say “space”, we really mean location, and “time” refers to the various time zones people live in. Dealing with a distributed team means keeping these forces in mind, since every action you take as the manager of a distributed team will be impacted by these forces. We must artificially introduce supporting structures that provide the same benefits as common-location rituals, such as lunch or clocking in at the same time.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":40,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"The Counterbalance: Effective Communication. Effective communication provides a framework for teams to bind around purpose. It’s like a trellis that enables vines to grow. Communication does not solve the purpose problem; it just provides structure for the team to grow in a unified direction with purpose. It is also the one tool managers have to get their distributed teams to work together more effectively across space and time.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":43,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"heading2","text":"Dimensions of Communication","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Communication always takes the easiest path. Being cognizant of this will save you a lot of pain as a manager (this is also a reason why many distributed teams fail).","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Consider how having a team mostly in office with a few dispersed remote team members affects communication. It might be easier for people in-office to walk over to someone—or yell across the table—to discuss something versus typing away in Slack. Or if it’s difficult to set up a conference call, the group of people may choose to run a meeting without waiting for the remotes to log in. At DigitalOcean, every conference room has a Hangout-equipped computer, so it’s never hard to get a meeting going with everyone.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"When running a distributed team, it’s helpful to think about communication in three dimensions:","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"Latency: How frequently do exchanges occur?","spans":[{"start":0,"end":7,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"Throughput: How deep are the exchanges?","spans":[{"start":0,"end":10,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"Cost: What’s the overhead of the exchange?","spans":[{"start":0,"end":4,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"With these dimensions, we can begin characterizing the common forms or modalities of communication:","spans":[]},{"type":"image","url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/18bc9f67bdf51749452b5b1299e5c5f07f60f4b4_screen-shot-2017-05-12-at-9.36.28-am.png?auto=compress,format","alt":"modalities of communication graphic","copyright":null,"dimensions":{"width":1062,"height":492}},{"type":"paragraph","text":"It’s important to remember that all modalities matter, and choosing one over the other means making explicit tradeoffs. Where possible, seek balance (e.g., choosing only IM as a form of communication but no email might mean deeper thinking is discouraged). All of this framework is important to consider as you manage and nurture a team, since conversations may need to span some or all of them, so choose your modalities wisely.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Make sure your team is using the right modalities for the communication they need to have. Guide conversations to the correct forums. Set guidelines, like knowing when to start a Hangout. Moderate the amount of face to face to give people time to think and ensure everyone who needs to be a part of the conversation is present. If you don’t, communication will be slower and far less efficient, taking you off the rails.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"How to Keep Distributed Teams Moving","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"There are (at least) three things you need to be doing in a distributed to keep things moving:","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"Stay aligned with what’s happening","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"Stay in touch with people","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"Keep an eye on the horizon","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Stay aligned. Alignment means that you and your team(s) have a shared contextual view of the (business/operating) world that allows them to function despite being out of time sync or in different locations. Staying aligned means paying attention to the following: progress (what, why, blockers), priorities (what’s most important), and people (offering praise and feedback, and addressing challenges).","spans":[{"start":0,"end":12,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Stay in touch. Where alignment ensures the team can operate without physical presence, staying in touch ensures the team can remain human in the face of space/time differences. Staying in touch includes scheduling regular 1:1s to connect with a person individually, schedule leadership syncs to connect with the leaders in your business, and holding office hours.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":13,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Keep an eye on the horizon. If you’re paying attention to the people and the work they do, the final major step is making sure you’re not overwhelmed by the details. You can’t lose track of the purpose when the details threaten to overwhelm you. A few simple things you can do to that end are asking when a task will be done (to drive urgency and encourage an environment open to discussing problems) and carving out time for thinking and planning.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":26,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"In conclusion, remember the forces at work against all distributed teams—space and time—and focus on creative effective communication practices to counteract those forces. Staying aligned and in touch will help you foster communication, and keeping an eye on the horizon will get you in the habit of talking through problems and setting aside time to think ahead.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Dave “Dizzy” Smith is a senior director of engineering at DigitalOcean. A software industry veteran with over 21 years of experience, he has a broad range of experience across real-time messaging systems, identity federation and authentication, and low-latency peer-to-peer data stores and has been an active contributor to many open source projects. Follow him on Twitter at @dizzyd.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":384,"type":"em"},{"start":376,"end":383,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"http://www.twitter.com/dizzyd"}}]}],"blog_post_date":"2017-08-22","tags":[{"tag1":{"tag":"Engineering","_linkType":"Link.document","_meta":{"uid":"engineering"}}}],"_meta":{"uid":"how-to-manage-build-and-nurture-distributed-teams"}}},{"node":{"author":{"_linkType":"Link.document","author_name":"Hollie Haggans","author_image":{"dimensions":{"width":400,"height":400},"alt":"Hollie Haggans","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/7793109e3fed5f875dc50b8866c8e631bd51d5b5_0bfbced-1.jpg?auto=compress,format"},"_meta":{"uid":"hollie_haggans"}},"blog_header_image":{"dimensions":{"width":784,"height":418},"alt":"Woman interviewing Man illustration","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/e2998af44cd18a7ad05e9dae5e714793557b3ddb_hatchpodcast_socialillo_blog_pat.png?auto=compress,format"},"blog_headline":[{"type":"heading1","text":"Marley Spoon: A Look into Their Stack and Team Structure","spans":[]}],"blog_post_content":[{"type":"paragraph","text":"Over the past eleven months, more than 1,600 startups from around the world have built their infrastructure on DigitalOcean through Hatch, our global incubator program designed to help startups as they scale. Launched in 2016, the goal of the program is to help support the next generation of startups get their products off the ground.","spans":[{"start":132,"end":137,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Marley Spoon, a subscription meal kit company based in Berlin and Hatch startup, sees infrastructure as an integral part of every engineer’s workflow. “We are trying to build a team where people don’t feel responsible just for a small bit, but we want to build a team where people feel responsible for the whole architecture,” says Stefano Zanella, Head of Software Engineering at Marley Spoon. “In order to do this, we believe that people need to know how the system works.”","spans":[{"start":0,"end":12,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://marleyspoon.com"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"In this interview, Zanella gives us a glimpse into Marley Spoon’s unique engineering team structure, and the technologies they use to power both their customer-facing platform and the internal-facing production and distribution platform. The following has been transcribed from our Deep End podcast, and adapted for this blog post.","spans":[{"start":282,"end":290,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://soundcloud.com/digitaloceanpodcast/marley-spoon-on-building-a-great-engineering-org-for-scale"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"DigitalOcean: How do you model your engineering teams?","spans":[{"start":0,"end":54,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Stefano Zanella: Our teams are shaped around user flows to some extent. We have currently four teams: three teams are product teams—they are related to the product itself—and one team actually takes care of the platform for the infrastructure.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":15,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"The [first] three teams, we shape them around the user flow. So, we have a team that takes care of the new customers. We call it the acquisition team because they focus mostly on marketing, but they also provide data insights, manage the customer experience for new customers, shorten the subscription flow, and so on.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Then we have a team that focuses on the recurring customers. It’s the team that takes care of the functionality like adding to an order, posing new subscriptions, keeping a delivery, changing your address, changing the time that you want your box at home, etc.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"And then the third team actually takes care of what we call the “back office” in the sense that we do it in our own production centers; we have warehouses all across the world. We have a tool that tracks how many orders need to be done, when, where, and [by] which warehouse. We have them organize the batches because we work a lot with shippers and we try to be just in time, because of course the food is fresh and we want to keep it just like that. So this team takes care of all the production-related issues.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"And how do you organize these teams? Do you have teams with maybe product managers, designers, engineers in the same group? Or [do] you isolate teams depending on their skill set or area of expertise?","spans":[{"start":0,"end":200,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"The interesting thing about Marley Spoon is that the situation is always changing. We are very proud of the fact that we believe in owning the process and changing the process and structure as we see fit.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"When we started we had an engineering team and a product team. Then, at some point, we realized that the communication structure wasn’t working well enough for us to be productive and effective enough. So we actually put the product managers inside the [engineering] teams. Then, we [also] figured out that the relationship with the designers wasn’t good enough, so we put the designers inside the team as well.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"For a certain period of time, we had teams [that] were functional from my point of view, and now since we are growing a lot, the team is growing, and we have different needs. We are [now] focusing on product managers aligning with the rest of the business, rather than with engineers because the relationship with engineers is really good right now. We moved the product team outside of the teams again, so they are their own team because we want them to also work as a team, not just be disconnected. We assign specific product managers to specific departments and then internally, the team shuffles the work to the engineering team. But it’s a situation that can change every time, because it really depends on where we see the problems.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Going down the technology side of things, what’s your stack and architecture right now? Or maybe you want to talk about how Marley Spoon evolved?","spans":[{"start":0,"end":145,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Well, actually let me answer the last part of your question, because I think it’s really interesting speaking about the engineers. So, we do believe that the main role of an engineer is not writing code, but it's actually running the system.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"And in order to do this, we believe that people need to know how the system works. They need to have a feeling of how the whole system is working. From that point of view, we don’t see all of the teams related to technology, for example. We use a workflow based on the Kanban workflow. Since it’s based on Kanban, every time somebody runs out of work, they are free to pick new work from the backlog. And the product managers manage the backlog, which means that whoever is free should pick stuff from the top because that’s the most important thing to do.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We don’t have this clear distinction between backend and frontend developers. We do have people that are more skilled at frontend or backend, but we try to broaden their scope of action all the time. So, from that point of view, we try to help each other a lot because we believe that’s the best way to grow.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Getting back to the stack question, what are the technologies you have in your architecture?","spans":[{"start":0,"end":92,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"So, mainly we are a Ruby-based company. We use Rails mainly for our web apps. We have a couple of projects that are pure Ruby because they are projects for background processing. We started them in Ruby, but we are considering switching to a different technology.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We are currently in the process of upgrading the stack because we were using Backbone as a library and Coffeescript as a language because that was what was coming out with default Rails 4. Now we are slowly moving toward React because we see a lot of traction outside and inside the team as well. So, we would like to give it a try.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We hope that will also help us shape and improve our relationship with the designers, for example. Then we have a small a command line tool, for our Kanban board because we wrote it ourselves. We wrote our own Kanban board because we like to have a tool that can evolve in the process. And we wrote a very little command line tool so that you can create tickets and move tickets around from the command line.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Tune into the full interview on our podcast, or learn more about our Hatch program today.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":28,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://soundcloud.com/digitaloceanpodcast/marley-spoon-on-building-a-great-engineering-org-for-scale"}},{"start":48,"end":82,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Hollie Haggans heads up Global Partnerships for DigitalOcean’s Hatch program. She is passionate about startups and cold brew coffee. Get in touch with questions at hatch@digitalocean.com.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":187,"type":"em"}]}],"blog_post_date":"2017-07-31","tags":[{"tag1":{"tag":"Community","_linkType":"Link.document","_meta":{"uid":"community"}}}],"_meta":{"uid":"marley-spoon"}}},{"node":{"author":{"_linkType":"Link.document","author_name":"Ben Uretsky","author_image":{"dimensions":{"width":197,"height":197},"alt":"Ben Uretsky","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/9c33dc1465bf14e543a18d402452f77970d3b4c1_aaeaaqaaaaaaaa3gaaaajdbmyjgxnzvjlti2zwutnddlzi04mgyxltlhyjfhotnlytgzna.jpg?auto=compress,format"},"_meta":{"uid":"ben_uretsky"}},"blog_header_image":{"dimensions":{"width":784,"height":418},"alt":"Sea creatures partying with a thank you and 1 million users banner illustration","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/97840b8ecbc9c64318a899b96a655247d04e4550_1million_blog.png?auto=compress,format"},"blog_headline":[{"type":"heading1","text":"Riding the Jet Stream to 1 Million Users","spans":[]}],"blog_post_content":[{"type":"paragraph","text":"Today, we’re excited to share a recent milestone with you: DO now supports 1 million users around the world. We’ve grown with our users, and have worked hard to give them the products they need to run their services without compromising the user experience they’ve come to love. We’re grateful to our users and community, and to the people that have helped us grow and learn along the way.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"In 2012, DigitalOcean had a modest start. Our staging environment was around 4 or 5 servers, and we had a handful of engineers running the platform. We had two datacenter regions, 200 Droplets deployed, and a vision for what cloud computing could become. But most importantly, we had the support of a community of developers that helped us realize that vision.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"A Maiden Voyage","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Holding user groups in our early stages really helped us answer key questions about what aspects of the user experience could be improved. We launched our first datacenter, NYC1, and opened up our first international datacenter, AMS1, in January 2012.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":19,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/a-lean-start-for-digital-ocean/"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Our users have played a huge part in helping us determine where to launch new datacenters to serve them better; in addition to NYC and Amsterdam, we now have them in San Francisco, Frankfurt, London, Singapore, Toronto, and Bangalore. Our dedicated team of network engineers, software engineers, datacenter technicians, and platform support specialists have worked tirelessly to give all of our users a great experience and access to simple cloud computing at any scale.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"Making Waves","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Among our early adopters were projects and companies like JsFiddle.net, AudioBox, and GitLab, who have scaled along with us as we’ve grown. Projects like Laravel Forge also chose to host their applications on DO. We’ve also partnered with companies like GitHub (Student Developer Pack and Hacktoberfest), Docker (Docker Student Developer Kit and our Docker one-click application), CoreOS, and Mesosphere on major initiatives.","spans":[{"start":58,"end":70,"type":"strong"},{"start":72,"end":80,"type":"strong"},{"start":86,"end":92,"type":"strong"},{"start":154,"end":167,"type":"strong"},{"start":254,"end":260,"type":"strong"},{"start":305,"end":311,"type":"strong"},{"start":381,"end":387,"type":"strong"},{"start":393,"end":403,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Developers that helped spread the word when we first started include John Resig (jQuery), Jeff Atwood (Stack Overflow), Ryan Bates (Railscast), Xavier Noria (core Rails contributor), and Salvatore Sanfilippo (Redis).","spans":[{"start":69,"end":79,"type":"strong"},{"start":90,"end":101,"type":"strong"},{"start":120,"end":130,"type":"strong"},{"start":144,"end":156,"type":"strong"},{"start":187,"end":207,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Pere Hospital, co-founder of Cloudways, found DigitalOcean in 2014 while looking for an IaaS partner that could add value to his clients’ business processes. When Cloudways hit 5,000 DO compute instances they had their own internal celebration—and they’ve added thousands more since.","spans":[{"start":29,"end":38,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"John O’Nolan, founder of Ghost, shared this anecdote: “On one of DigitalOcean's birthdays, the team sent us a couple of vinyl shark toys as a surprise and a thank you for being a customer. These sharks quickly became a mainstay of our weekly team meetings, along with the most horrific slew of puns: “Are you being ‘shark-astic’?” “That sounds a bit fishy.” etc. The jokes went so far that six months later we somehow found ourselves on a retreat in Thailand with our CTO, Hannah, coding at a table in a full-body shark costume.”","spans":[{"start":25,"end":30,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"preformatted","text":"6 months ago @digitalocean sent us a shark toy and now the jokes have escalated so far that our CTO is literally coding in a shark suit. pic.twitter.com/6UpQuoPFrW\n— John O'Nolan @ 🇬🇧 (@JohnONolan) December 5, 2016","spans":[{"start":13,"end":26,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://twitter.com/digitalocean"}},{"start":137,"end":163,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://t.co/6UpQuoPFrW"}},{"start":198,"end":214,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://twitter.com/JohnONolan/status/805706906333388801"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Additionally, several community members embraced DO and created tools that extended our API early on. Jack Pearkes created the command line tool, Tugboat, in 2013. Ørjan Blom created Barge, a Ruby library that pre-dated our official Ruby library, droplet_kit. Lorenzo Setale created python-digitalocean, which remains the most widely used Python library on DO. And Antoine Corcy created DigitalOceanV2, a library that helps PHP applications interact with v2 of the DO API. There have also been many others that have shared feedback with us and created tools of their own. We thank all of you for being a part of this.","spans":[{"start":146,"end":153,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://github.com/petems/tugboat"}},{"start":183,"end":188,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://github.com/blom/barge"}},{"start":283,"end":302,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://github.com/koalalorenzo/python-digitalocean"}},{"start":387,"end":401,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://github.com/toin0u/DigitalOceanV2"}}]},{"type":"heading2","text":"All Hands on Deck","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Members of the DO community have become a part of the DO family. We’ve reached over 1,600 tutorials on our Community site, in large part due to technologists that have contributed articles through participation in our Get Paid to Write program. Marko Mudrinić, for example, has written a number of articles for the Community site, frequently engages with other users in our Q&A section, and contributes to the official DO command line tool, doctl.","spans":[{"start":245,"end":259,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/community/users/xmudrii"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We’ve been lucky to have community members go on to join the DO team, like Community Manager Kamal Nasser and Platform Support Specialist Jonathan Tittle. Jonathan was an early adopter, having migrated his company’s customers to DO back in 2012. He then became one of our most engaged Community members. Jonathan told me, “When I look over questions posted to the DigitalOcean Community, I can honestly look back and say 'I’ve been there' and recall the countless times that I ran into an issue and couldn’t find the answer on my own, much less get the help I needed from someone who knew. When the questions were stacking up one day, I dove in and did my best to help. I quickly found myself spending countless hours troubleshooting alongside a user until an issue was resolved. I was simply trying to offer a helping hand when and where I could.”","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"Over the Horizon","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"The journey to 1 million is full of stories, people, moments, events, and companies that have crossed paths with us and have inspired us. Our users have been with us every step of the way, and we’ve tasked ourselves with meeting their growing infrastructure needs, and their goals for engaging and collaborating with us. There is so much more to come, and we’re excited to share it all with you. Thank you!","spans":[{"start":235,"end":263,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://blog.digitalocean.com/2017-whats-shipping-next-on-digitalocean/"}},{"start":285,"end":319,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://blog.digitalocean.com/tag/community/"}}]}],"blog_post_date":"2017-07-19","tags":[{"tag1":{"tag":"Community","_linkType":"Link.document","_meta":{"uid":"community"}}}],"_meta":{"uid":"1-million-users"}}},{"node":{"author":{"_linkType":"Link.document","author_name":"Ben Uretsky","author_image":{"dimensions":{"width":197,"height":197},"alt":"Ben Uretsky","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/9c33dc1465bf14e543a18d402452f77970d3b4c1_aaeaaqaaaaaaaa3gaaaajdbmyjgxnzvjlti2zwutnddlzi04mgyxltlhyjfhotnlytgzna.jpg?auto=compress,format"},"_meta":{"uid":"ben_uretsky"}},"blog_header_image":{"dimensions":{"width":784,"height":418},"alt":"banner flags with the words Net Neutrality illustration","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/d9acdba6807edab1dee707e8da1fda9f642bb47e_net_neutrality_blog.png?auto=compress,format"},"blog_headline":[{"type":"heading1","text":"Net Neutrality: Why the Internet Must Remain Open and Accessible","spans":[]}],"blog_post_content":[{"type":"paragraph","text":"DigitalOcean is proud to be taking part in today’s Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality. Access to an open internet is crucial to allowing companies like DigitalOcean and the thousands of businesses we power to exist. This is not something we can take for granted. Efforts to roll back the protections provided by net neutrality rules will stifle innovation and create an uneven playing field for smaller companies competing with entrenched players.","spans":[{"start":51,"end":87,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.battleforthenet.com/july12/"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"I want to share the letter that I sent to our representatives in the Senate and encourage you to join us in speaking up while there's still time.","spans":[]},{"type":"preformatted","text":"DigitalOcean Inc. supports the Federal Communication Commission’s Open Internet Order and the principles of network neutrality that it upholds. As an infrastructure provider serving over one million registered users, we support our customers’ rights to fair, equal, and open networks access as outlined in the Order. We have not experienced, nor do we anticipate experiencing, any negative impact on broadband investment or service as a result of the Order.We strongly oppose the Commission’s recent proposal to dismantle the 2015 Open Internet Order. As evidenced by the federal judiciary over the past two decades in Comcast Corp. v. FCC and other cases, the Commission cannot enforce unbiased and neutral Internet access without the Title II classification of broadband providers as telecommunications providers. Therefore, we ask you to codify Title II reclassification into law. It is the only way to uphold network neutrality principles.As a direct competitor to the largest technology infrastructure providers in the nation, we are concerned that the Commission’s recent Notice for Proposed Rulemaking (WC Docket No. 17-108) will create an anti-competitive market environment because the costs of unfair networking practices will be forced onto infrastructure providers such as ourselves. Furthermore, many of our customers are individuals or small edge providers for whom changes to current network neutrality policies would significantly raise barriers to entry in various markets. Without legal protections against network blocking, throttling, unreasonable interference, and paid prioritization, it will be more difficult for us and for our customers to innovate, compete, and support the free flow of information.By protecting network neutrality, we hope that the 115th Congress can promote investment in New York, eliminate business uncertainty with regards to FCC rulemaking, support competition in the broadband market, and encourage small businesses to innovate. We look forward to working with you on passing legislation related to this issue.Signed,Ben Uretsky,\n CEO, DigitalOcean Inc.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"If you’re in the US, join us and stand up for your right to an open and accessible internet by submitting your own letter to the FCC today.","spans":[{"start":95,"end":132,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.battleforthenet.com"}}]}],"blog_post_date":"2017-07-11","tags":[{"tag1":{"tag":"News","_linkType":"Link.document","_meta":{"uid":"news"}}}],"_meta":{"uid":"net-neutrality-letter"}}},{"node":{"author":{"_linkType":"Link.document","author_name":"Prabhakar (PJ) Jayakumar","author_image":null,"_meta":{"uid":"prabhakar_pj_jayakumar"}},"blog_header_image":{"dimensions":{"width":784,"height":418},"alt":"DO India 1st Anniversary","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/55b8556a50a8173743e49c1b99b81a3611e52595_india1stanniversary_blog_flagedit.png?auto=compress,format"},"blog_headline":[{"type":"heading1","text":"Looking Back at DigitalOcean’s First Year in India","spans":[]}],"blog_post_content":[{"type":"paragraph","text":"It’s been a year since we established DigitalOcean’s presence in India, starting with our Bangalore office and BLR1 datacenter, and it’s been nothing short of an exhilarating ride! We are excited about being able to cater to the needs of the developer community in India and its neighboring regions, and we’re humbled by the love our customers have shown.","spans":[{"start":111,"end":126,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://blog.digitalocean.com/introducing-our-bangalore-region-blr1/"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"In this blog post, we’ll share some memorable highlights from engaging with India’s growing developer community over the past 12 months.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"Face-to-Face With India’s Developers: Conferences, Meetups, and Hackathons","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"This past fall, we organized a “Product-a-thon” contest named Campus Shark targeted at university students to identify and recognize the best student engineers across colleges in India. The contest saw participation from student teams across colleges in more than 30 Indian cities, spanning from Silchar (Assam) in the East, Ahmedabad (Gujarat) in the West, Thiruvananthapuram (Kerala) in the South, to Jalandhar (Punjab) in the North. Student teams worked on a diverse set of projects relevant for the local community, including:","spans":[{"start":62,"end":74,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"http://campusshark.incubatehub.com/"}}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"A robotic shopping cart that aimed at making a hands-free shopping experience","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"An app that sent an SOS or helped find assistance during an emergency","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"A pedal powered centrifugal pump that aids irrigation in areas without electricity, and","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"A crowdfunding platform that connects nonprofits with volunteers.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"This past fall, we ran our Hacktoberfest initiative and partnered with IndiaStack to organize their first-ever hackathon around the Aadhaar Auth API. IndiaStack is a set of public, open APIs, and systems that allow government entities, businesses, startups, and developers to utilize a unique digital infrastructure to solve India’s pressing problems.","spans":[{"start":27,"end":40,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://blog.digitalocean.com/open-source-at-its-hacktoberbest/"}},{"start":72,"end":82,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We’ve hosted two editions of our signature Tide Conference, where we’ve seen enthusiastic participation from hundreds of developers and startups, and Tide has become a platform for them to connect, network, and engage with influencers, mentors, and VCs in the tech ecosystem. Additionally, DO Meetups have expanded to chapters across six cities (Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, and Chennai).","spans":[{"start":43,"end":58,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLseEp7p6EwibComadzJiMhr6rpmjRJVtb"}},{"start":290,"end":300,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.meetup.com/pro/digitalocean/"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We’ve also added monthly webinars from industry experts such as MSV Janakiram to our ongoing programming, and continue to facilitate workshops, hackathons, and coding contests across India.","spans":[{"start":17,"end":33,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLseEp7p6EwiY7E3UUos1gETnDmtzYg2au"}},{"start":64,"end":77,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"image","url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/bd3c01590844184d26e5e3deb85c646daa08eef4_indiacollage.png?auto=compress,format","alt":"India events picture collage","copyright":null,"dimensions":{"width":790,"height":746}},{"type":"heading2","text":"Becoming a Part of India’s Startup Ecosystem","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"As part of our global incubator program Hatch, we are collaborating with more than 60 partners from the ecosystem (including top-tier accelerators like NUMA, incubators such as Nasscom 10K startups, VCs such as Accel and SAIF Partners, and government-run initiatives like the Startup India program), with hundreds of startups getting year-long free access to our infrastructure, technical training, mentorship, and priority support.","spans":[{"start":40,"end":45,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/"}},{"start":152,"end":156,"type":"strong"},{"start":177,"end":197,"type":"strong"},{"start":211,"end":216,"type":"strong"},{"start":221,"end":234,"type":"strong"},{"start":276,"end":297,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We are proud to have amazing Indian companies such as NoBroker.in, Betaout, KartRocket, and HackerRank among our customers today.","spans":[{"start":54,"end":65,"type":"strong"},{"start":67,"end":74,"type":"strong"},{"start":76,"end":86,"type":"strong"},{"start":92,"end":102,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"preformatted","text":"Akhil Gupta, co-founder and CTO of NoBroker.in, says, “NoBroker was one of the first customers of DigitalOcean in India and since Day 1 we have been amazed with the simplicity of the solution. DO has grown in last 3 years and launched some amazing products like Floating IP and Block Storage which covers what is required for a production cluster. Many times we have been stuck for implementation and DO technical blogs have come to our rescue with [their] step-by-step installation guide.”","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"What’s Next","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"As we embark on yet another year, we will endeavor to continue empowering developers and software companies to build amazing things while our robust, affordable, and simple infrastructure does the heavy-lifting for them. To date, over 492,000 Droplets have been deployed in BLR1, and nearly one third of DO’s global Meetup presence is in India. With Block Storage to be launched in BLR1 by early Q3, and a host of new products in the 2017 roadmap, we’re focused on making it easier than ever for startups and teams of software developers from India to deploy and scale their applications.","spans":[{"start":434,"end":446,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://blog.digitalocean.com/2017-whats-shipping-next-on-digitalocean/"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"If you have participated in any of our activities or if you have suggestions on how you would like to engage with DigitalOcean, let us know in the comments below. We’re looking forward to partnering with you and supporting your needs in the year ahead!","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Prabhakar (PJ) Jayakumar is DigitalOcean's India Country Manager. He is responsible for running the firm’s operations in India, and his team is focused on both building out the DO community and supporting the localized needs of India’s developer and startup ecosystem.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":24,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.linkedin.com/in/prabhakarpj/"}},{"start":0,"end":268,"type":"em"}]}],"blog_post_date":"2017-06-14","tags":[{"tag1":{"tag":"Community","_linkType":"Link.document","_meta":{"uid":"community"}}}],"_meta":{"uid":"looking-back-at-digitaloceans-first-year-in-india"}}},{"node":{"author":{"_linkType":"Link.document","author_name":"Rafael Rosa","author_image":{"dimensions":{"width":250,"height":250},"alt":"Rafael Rosa","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/6326cb734e557630247062ec390166664f5d3b63_77d07a0ba7bc27b40afc8f5932c57417.png?auto=compress,format"},"_meta":{"uid":"rafael_rosa"}},"blog_header_image":{"dimensions":{"width":784,"height":418},"alt":"droplets in boxes illustration","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/07500b15cbd44162d35f7136ade16e4401b5b829_firewalls_blog.png?auto=compress,format"},"blog_headline":[{"type":"heading1","text":"Cloud Firewalls: Secure Droplets by Default","spans":[]}],"blog_post_content":[{"type":"paragraph","text":"When deploying a new application or service, security is always a top concern. The internet is full of malicious actors probing applications for vulnerabilities and sniffing for open ports. Tools like iptables are essential to any developer’s toolkit, but they can be complicated to use, especially when building distributed services. Adding a new Droplet can require updating your configuration across all of your infrastructure.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"At DigitalOcean, we are working to make it easier for developers to build applications and deploy them to the cloud by simplifying the infrastructure experience. Today, we’re excited to bring that approach to security with Cloud Firewalls, an easily configurable service for securing your Droplets. It is free to use and designed to scale with you as you grow.","spans":[{"start":223,"end":238,"type":"strong"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"By using Cloud Firewalls, you will have a central location to define access rules and apply them to all of your Droplets. We enforce these rules on our network layer. Unauthorized traffic will not reach your Droplets, and this protection doesn't consume any resources from your Droplet.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"Secure by Default","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"When using Firewalls, we start from the principle of least privilege—only the ports and IPs explicitly defined by you will be accessible. Any packet that doesn't fit the rules will be dropped before it reaches your Droplet. A simple Firewall that would only allow HTTP, SSH, and ICMP connections from any source would need three rules:","spans":[]},{"type":"image","url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/65df6a70d0f5a5a2e06e57fd13bfd776fb97c0c8_create-firewall-screenshot.png?auto=compress,format","alt":"Create Firewall screenshot","copyright":null,"dimensions":{"width":1046,"height":701}},{"type":"paragraph","text":"If someone tried to access this Droplet on any other port—say FTP using port 21—they would receive a timeout because Firewalls filtered out the traffic.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"Easy to Configure","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We’ve designed Firewalls to be easy to configure. Your source and destination rules can specify individual Droplets by name, Load Balancers, IP ranges, and even sets of Droplets by using Tags.","spans":[]},{"type":"image","url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/1c24ff7323aea25da2ac66d85f9b3794d32ed358_outbound-rules-screenshot.png?auto=compress,format","alt":"Outbound rules screenshot","copyright":null,"dimensions":{"width":1021,"height":290}},{"type":"paragraph","text":"For finer-grained control, you can also apply multiple Firewalls to a Droplet. This allows you to keep rules for different concerns in different Firewalls. For example, you could create one Firewall called webapp-firewall, that allows only HTTP on port 80, and another called admin-firewall, that allows SSH and ICMP from only a specific IP. Our service will combine their rules and enforce them together.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Beyond the Control Panel, you can manage your Firewalls on the command line with doctl or automate using our RESTful API or our Go and Ruby API client libraries. Expect more integrations to come along soon, thanks to our amazing community.","spans":[{"start":81,"end":86,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://github.com/digitalocean/doctl"}},{"start":109,"end":120,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://developers.digitalocean.com/documentation/v2/#firewalls"}}]},{"type":"heading2","text":"Works at Scale","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Even without automation, Firewalls makes it much easier to secure distributed applications with large numbers of resources. You can leverage tagging to group and organize any number of Droplets, and use them to define how each group of Droplets is secured by Firewalls.","spans":[{"start":132,"end":148,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-tag-digitalocean-droplets"}}]},{"type":"image","url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/96a7aac758ac6b862c195eb15bf8d4b72dc2c25f_inbound-rules-screenshot.png?auto=compress,format","alt":"Inbound rules screenshot","copyright":null,"dimensions":{"width":1023,"height":278}},{"type":"paragraph","text":"For example, you could create a Firewall called db-firewall and only allow inbound connections from all Droplets tagged frontend, securing your database from unauthorized access. If you add this tag to more Droplets, they will automatically be recognized by our system and be whitelisted by this rule.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"Getting Started","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Whether you’re ready to dive in and create your first Firewall or you just want to learn more, check out these tutorials on our Community site for all the details and some best practices:","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"How to Create Your First DigitalOcean Firewall","spans":[{"start":0,"end":46,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-your-first-digitalocean-cloud-firewall"}}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"An Introduction to DigitalOcean Firewalls","spans":[{"start":0,"end":41,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduction-to-digitalocean-cloud-firewalls"}}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"How to Organize DigitalOcean Firewalls","spans":[{"start":0,"end":38,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-organize-your-digitalocean-cloud-firewalls"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We can’t wait to hear your feedback. It helps guide us as we continue to work on making your infrastructure more secure and easier to manage at scale. Let us know what you think in the comments below, and stay tuned for major network security improvements later this year.","spans":[]}],"blog_post_date":"2017-06-06","tags":[{"tag1":{"tag":"Product Updates","_linkType":"Link.document","_meta":{"uid":"product-updates"}}}],"_meta":{"uid":"cloud-firewalls-secure-droplets-by-default"}}},{"node":{"author":{"_linkType":"Link.document","author_name":"Alejandro (Alex) Jaimes","author_image":{"dimensions":{"width":1600,"height":1067},"alt":"Alejandro (Alex) Jaimes","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/2ef201f3af242c6dface5c525637e5d45cac7050_ldv_20150519_0485.jpg?auto=compress,format"},"_meta":{"uid":"alejandro_alex_jaimes"}},"blog_header_image":{"dimensions":{"width":785,"height":418},"alt":"AI letter illustration","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/4192a269dfed282ea3298d24ab19081824e1277d_ai_blog_kasia.png?auto=compress,format"},"blog_headline":[{"type":"heading1","text":"The State of AI","spans":[]}],"blog_post_content":[{"type":"paragraph","text":"This post is the first in a three-part series we're publishing this year on artificial intelligence, written by DigitalOcean’s Head of R&D, Alejandro (Alex) Jaimes.","spans":[{"start":0,"end":164,"type":"em"}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"In recent months, the amount of media coverage on AI has increased so significantly that a day doesn’t go by without news about it. Whether it’s an acquisition, a funding round, a new application, a technical innovation, or an opinion piece on ethical and philosophical issues (“AI will replace humans, take over the world, eat software, eat the world”), the content just keeps coming.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"The field is progressing at amazing speeds and there’s a lot of experimentation. But with so much noise, it’s hard to distinguish hype from reality, and while everyone seems to be rushing into AI in one way or another, it’s fair to say there is a good amount of confusion on what AI really is, what sort of value it can bring and where things will go next.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"While the reality is that AI has the potential to impact just about everything and be embedded in just about anything—just like software already is—getting started can be daunting, depending on who you ask.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"In this post, I will first explain why computing is now AI. Then, in future posts, I’ll describe the most significant trends, outline steps to be taken in actually implementing AI in practice, and say a few words about the future.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"Computing Is Now AI","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"AI is already embedded, in some form, in most of the computing services we use on a daily basis: when we search the web, visit a webpage, read our email, use social media, use our phone, etc. Most of those applications use some form of machine learning to perform “basic” tasks, like spam detection, personalization, and advertising. But like computing itself, penetration of AI doesn’t stop there. Our transportation systems, security, cargo shipping, banking, dating, and just about everything else is likely “touched” by algorithms that use machine learning.","spans":[]},{"type":"image","url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/c7357ac1b776146a21e76fd1c46a7091c7e75b9a_ai-umbrella-1.png?auto=compress,format","alt":"Ai umbrella","copyright":null,"dimensions":{"width":282,"height":264}},{"type":"preformatted","text":"AI is really an umbrella term that encompasses many subfields. For the sake of simplicity, most of what people think of as AI currently has machine learning, and/or deep learning. The ideas behind the three concepts are rather straightforward: AI aims to \"emulate or supercede human intelligence,\" machine learning is concerned with algorithms that learn models from data, and deep learning is \"simply\" a subset of machine learning algorithms that learn from data with less human intervention. In building \"traditional\" machine learning algorithms an engineer has to design features, but in a deep learning framework the features themselves are learned by the algorithm—those algorithms, however, need significantly greater amounts of data.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Some industries use computing technology in more advanced ways than others. Tech companies, in particular, have taken the lead in developing products and services around data and AI (in various forms), and scaling to millions and billions of users. This has led to significant advances in some areas where having large, diverse datasets can improve performance to the point where problems that seemed out of reach now seem solvable. Other industries, such as healthcare and education, have been slower to adapt, but we're beginning to see significant progress with very promising prospects.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"If we look closely at trends, and technical requirements (for AI to deliver in products and services), it's easy to see that AI can already be applied everywhere. More specifically, where repetitive patterns occur, and those patterns can be recorded, whether the data is individual or aggregated. One could easily argue that everything in life—and business—consists of cycles, and what's changed significantly in recent years is our ability to record, store, and process behavioral patterns at every level. AI adds prediction, which is extremely valuable.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"The power of AI comes at multiple granularities. There are a plethora of decisions made every day based on simple, repetitive patterns—and those apply to businesses as much as they do to individuals. It's no surprise then, that most companies are using AI today to cut costs and improve efficiency. As more processes become digital, AI, then, becomes not just a critical part of the ecosystem, but the driving force, in large part because its main benefit is efficiency. And if we look at things from this perspective, it's easy to see why computing and AI are already converging to the point where there's no distinction. It the very near future, it will be assumed that AI is part of computing, just as networking and other technical components are.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"This is not a minor shift, however. It is massive because it emphasizes processes that leverage data, and evolving models (vs. \"fixed\" algorithms), impacting how software is developed. This has several ripple effects that I'll describe in future posts, including pushing the hardware boundaries. I would argue that the companies and teams that understand this and think and operate with this mindset will now have a significant advantage over others that try to \"add\" AI at a later stage.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"On one hand, this means that individuals and teams must constantly learn and grow, remain up to date, and rely on the larger community for the exchange of models, ideas, code, and knowledge. It also means that applications will be increasingly built by layering components and data—nothing will be built from scratch. For hobbyists, \"professional\" developers, engineering teams, the open source community, and companies, this translates into significant synergies—an ecosystem that relies on the cloud, which is the perfect platform to combine multiple resources and scale with a single click. Ultimately, this implies that AI skills will be as critical to individuals as they are to companies, and they will form the basis of economic progress for decades to come.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We'd love to get your thoughts on AI. How it has impacted the way you build software? What do you think you need to make AI part of your workflow? What opportunities and barriers do you see? What are the topics you'd like to learn more about or the tools you'd like to use? Let us know in the comments below!","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"*Alejandro (Alex) Jaimes is Head of R&D at DigitalOcean. Alex enjoys scuba diving and started coding in Assembly when he was 12. In spite of his fear of heights, he's climbed a peak or two, gone paragliding, and ridden a bull in a rodeo. He's been a startup CTO and advisor, and has held leadership positions at Yahoo, Telefonica, IDIAP, FujiXerox, and IBM TJ Watson, among others. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Learn more by visiting his personal website or LinkedIn profile. Find him on Twitter: @tinybigdata.*","spans":[{"start":27,"end":43,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"http://www.alexjaimes.com"}},{"start":47,"end":63,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexjaimes/"}},{"start":86,"end":98,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"http://www.twitter.com/tinybigdata"}}]}],"blog_post_date":"2017-05-31","tags":[{"tag1":{"tag":"Engineering","_linkType":"Link.document","_meta":{"uid":"engineering"}}}],"_meta":{"uid":"the-state-of-ai"}}},{"node":{"author":{"_linkType":"Link.document","author_name":"DigitalOcean","author_image":{"dimensions":{"width":600,"height":600},"alt":"Sammy avatar","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/a10e3c2eb15b74ee43f872be3044313423b1c9a9_sammy_avatar.png?auto=compress,format"},"_meta":{"uid":"digitalocean"}},"blog_header_image":{"dimensions":{"width":784,"height":418},"alt":"droplets with graphs illustration","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/01fd5d62fe33bee721babce0248161bc0727aa51_monitoring-alerts-notifications-blog-am-v2.2.png?auto=compress,format"},"blog_headline":[{"type":"heading1","text":"DigitalOcean Monitoring","spans":[]}],"blog_post_content":[{"type":"paragraph","text":"We designed DigitalOcean Monitoring and its service alerts to provide insight into overall Droplet performance. In this post, we’ll cover key design decisions on Droplet-level Monitoring so you can better understand the choices we have made and how you can best use this service.","spans":[{"start":12,"end":35,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/products/monitoring/"}}]},{"type":"heading2","text":"CPU Measurement: Use a consistent scale regardless of the number of CPUs","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"When a server has more than one CPU, there are two main ways to display CPU utilization in a single metric. One option is to have each CPU counted as 100% value, so that a two CPU server has a maximum capacity of 200%, while an eight CPU server has a maximum capacity of 800%. The other option is to display the total capacity as 100%, which is what you'll find with DigitalOcean Monitoring.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We used the 0-100 scale on DigitalOcean because it provides a consistent way to think about capacity. For example, when setting up Monitoring, you'll choose 70% when you want to know that 70% of the server's total CPU capacity is being used. This is regardless of the number of processors, so you'll see usage displayed on the same scale.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"Notification Thresholds: Prefer certainty over early detection","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Just as there are multiple ways to display CPU utilization there are multiple ways to display notification thresholds. At one end of the spectrum, administrators may wish to be notified at the very first sign of an issue. This allows for intervention at the earliest possible moment and can therefore reduce the impact of a problem. Erring on this side, however, can lead to a \"server that cried wolf\" situation where most notifications may not actually indicate an issue. When false alarms regularly get mixed into reports of real problems, time and attention is spent on non-issues. If this happens often enough, notifications of real emergencies may be ignored.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"At the other end of the spectrum, administrators may wish to receive notifications only when there is solid indication of a real issue. Sometimes, a temporary situation may resolve itself prior to the administrator even receiving a notification. This can increase trust that the notification requires action, but it also means that users may experience disruption before the situation is brought to an administrator's attention.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We decided to address this question by creating alerts when a server is experiencing a sustained problem. To accomplish this, data is measured each minute and an average of the data points is used. For example, if a service alert is set to send email when the CPU usage is above 90% during a 5-minute interval, the average of those data points must exceed 90% before the notification is triggered. As each minute passes, the oldest datapoint of the interval is dropped, the newest data point is added, and the average is recalculated.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"Notification Frequency: Prefer signal over noise","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"With service alerts, it is important to balance information sharing with meaningful notifications. For notifications to be useful and actionable, it is important that they do not become too prolific.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We set up DigitalOcean service alerts to send a single notification when a threshold is reached. No additional notifications are sent until the situation is resolved. For example, when the average over 5 minutes drops below 90%, a notification will be sent that the situation is resolved. This, too, is intended to avoid notification fatigue and ensure notifications are more significant.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"To learn more about DigitalOcean alerts and notifications, you can get a detailed overview in An Introduction to Monitoring. To create your first alerts, see How to Set Up Service Alerts with DigitalOcean Monitoring. You might also like to explore one of our many tutorials for installing and configuring your own monitoring services.","spans":[{"start":94,"end":123,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduction-to-digitalocean-monitoring"}},{"start":158,"end":215,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-alerts-with-digitalocean-monitoring"}},{"start":255,"end":333,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tags/monitoring?type=tutorials"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We always welcome feedback! If there are other design decisions we have made that you would like to hear more about, let us know in the comments or open a request on our UserVoice.","spans":[{"start":170,"end":179,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/"}}]}],"blog_post_date":"2017-05-10","tags":[{"tag1":{"tag":"Product Updates","_linkType":"Link.document","_meta":{"uid":"product-updates"}}}],"_meta":{"uid":"digitalocean-monitoring-insight-into-key-decisions"}}}]}}}