{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-author-jsx","path":"/blog/author/david_e_worth/","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":"<iframe width=\"200\" height=\"113\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/NvHQSV7jnKA?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen></iframe>"}},{"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":"<iframe width=\"200\" height=\"113\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/Qt7QihVuxiE?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen></iframe>"}},{"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":0,"numAuthorPages":1,"currentPage":1,"uid":"david_e_worth","data":[{"node":{"author":{"_linkType":"Link.document","author_name":"David E. Worth","author_image":{"dimensions":{"width":250,"height":250},"alt":"David E. Worth","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/88908d6f279ad5cae0d19e5f8f8193854aa2d489_da3f9c3ffc8b92a283a0dc067f6750f7.jpg?auto=compress,format"},"_meta":{"uid":"david_e_worth"}},"blog_header_image":{"dimensions":{"width":784,"height":418},"alt":null,"copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/04445093-8458-49ab-abb1-7932e6da088b_droplet-tag.png?auto=compress,format"},"blog_headline":[{"type":"heading1","text":"Droplet Tagging: Organize Your Infrastructure","spans":[]}],"blog_post_content":[{"type":"paragraph","text":"At DigitalOcean, we are on a mission to make managing production applications simple. Today, we are officially announcing the addition of Droplet tags to make it even easier to work with large-scale production applications.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Last fall, we quietly launched tagging and management of resources via our public API. Since then, over 94,000 Droplets have been tagged including use cases like:","spans":[{"start":31,"end":85,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://developers.digitalocean.com/documentation/v2/#tags"}}]},{"type":"list-item","text":"Blue/green deployments","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"Ownership assertions, e.g. Droplets tagged webserver:dave or team:metrics","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"Environment assertions, e.g. env:production or env:dev","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"Application assertions, e.g. MySQL, MongoDB, web","spans":[]},{"type":"list-item","text":"Even deployment platforms, like Kubernetes!","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"As developers ourselves, we know how important it is to stay organized when working on and managing applications. Tags are a simple and powerful way to do this.","spans":[]},{"type":"heading2","text":"How Do You Use Tags?","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"When we released tagging via the API, we received a lot of fantastic feedback. It was exciting to see our community embrace a feature to this extent, and it proved that we needed to add tags to our Cloud control panel too.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We've added tags to all Droplet-related views, like the main Droplets page, in order to make managing your Droplets and tags simpler from wherever you are - Cloud control panel, Metadata Service, and API.","spans":[]},{"type":"image","url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/aba1adb0-2af5-4e8c-a50d-fbf4f856382d_screenshot1.png?auto=compress,format","alt":"control panel","copyright":null,"dimensions":{"width":1146,"height":896}},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We also created a new tag-only view, which allows you to see all Droplets with a given tag. Here, you can see how our team groups our production Droplets by tag:","spans":[]},{"type":"image","url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/b7a29738-034c-47b0-b4f8-339993e3509e_screenshot2.png?auto=compress,format","alt":"control panel filtered by tag","copyright":null,"dimensions":{"width":1146,"height":617}},{"type":"paragraph","text":"For more detail on how to use tags via the control panel, check out our tagging tutorial on our Community Site.","spans":[{"start":72,"end":110,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-tag-digitalocean-droplets"}}]},{"type":"heading2","text":"What Can You Use Tags For?","spans":[]},{"type":"heading3","text":"Managing Resource Ownership","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"A simple tag like `team:data` or `team:widget` makes it easy to know exactly who is responsible for a given set of Droplets. For example, different teams in a company may share a single DigitalOcean Team, and can use tags to track their resource usage separately. Engineers on an on-call rotation, an ops-team, a finance team, or anyone simply debugging a problem can benefit from these kinds of tags as well.","spans":[{"start":186,"end":203,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-teams-on-digitalocean"}}]},{"type":"heading3","text":"Monitoring and Automation","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Knowing the importance of a given Droplet to the healthy operation of a product is an essential part of ensuring the reliability of your system, and tagging your Droplets with `env:production` or `env:dev` can help facilitate this.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"For example, if your alerting infrastructure is tag-aware, rules can be made less sensitive to increased load or memory usage on a staging or development server than on production servers. If your infrastructure management system is sufficiently mature, you may be able to self-heal by scaling your application servers automatically.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Similarly, with Prometheus' file-based service discovery and regular calls to the DigitalOcean API (e.g., by a cronjob), you can dynamically configure metrics based on tags. You can fine tune parameters like scrape interval, evaluation interval, and any external labels you want to apply — which may be tags themselves.","spans":[{"start":16,"end":26,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://prometheus.io/"}},{"start":82,"end":98,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://developers.digitalocean.com/"}}]},{"type":"heading3","text":"Logging and Data Retention Policies","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Logging and metric data is invaluable, especially during outages, but storing that data can be costly on high-traffic systems. Tagging resources and including those tags in your structured logs can be used to dictate log retention policies. This can help optimize disk usage to ensure critical infrastructure has the most log retention while test servers get little or none. Systems such as RSyslog can apply rules based on JSON-structured logs in CEE format.","spans":[{"start":424,"end":459,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"http://www.rsyslog.com/json-elasticsearch/"}}]},{"type":"heading3","text":"Deployments and Infrastructure Management","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"A common strategy for testing and rolling out deployments is to use blue/green deployments. Implementing a blue/green deployment becomes easy with tags; simply use two tags, `blue` and `green`, to track which Droplets are in which set, then use the API to trigger the promotion (by switching the traffic direction later, e.g. by updating a Floating IP, load balancer configuration, or DNS record).","spans":[{"start":107,"end":128,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-blue-green-deployments-to-release-software-safely#what-is-blue-green-deployment"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Infrastructure management is an art in and of itself. Recently, our own Tommy Murphy contributed support for DigitalOcean's tags to HashiCorp's Terraform infrastructure automation platform. This has been used to build lightweight firewall management tooling (GitHub) to ensure that hosts with a given tag can pass traffic but will drop traffic from any other host.","spans":[{"start":72,"end":84,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://twitter.com/tam7t"}},{"start":109,"end":153,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/do/r/tag.html"}},{"start":259,"end":265,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://github.com/tam7t/droplan"}}]},{"type":"heading2","text":"What's Coming Up Next?","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Being able to tag your Droplets is only the beginning. We know that Block Storage, Floating IPs, DNS records, and other resources are all critical parts of your production infrastructure too. In order to make your deployment, monitoring, and development infrastructure simpler to manage, we're working on letting you manage entire groups of resources via tags over the coming months.","spans":[{"start":68,"end":81,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://assets.digitalocean.com/blog/static/block-storage-more-space-to-scale/"}},{"start":83,"end":95,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://assets.digitalocean.com/blog/static/floating-ips-start-architecting-your-applications-for-high-availability/"}},{"start":97,"end":108,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://assets.digitalocean.com/blog/static/digitalocean-labs-presents-dns-management/"}}]},{"type":"heading2","text":"Conclusion","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Thank you to everyone who has used tags and provided feedback. We hope these improvements help make it a little easier for you to build and ship great things. Please keep the feedback coming. How do you use tagging to manage your infrastructure? We would love to hear from you!","spans":[{"start":166,"end":190,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://digitalocean.uservoice.com"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"by David E. Worth","spans":[{"start":3,"end":17,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://twitter.com/david_e_worth"}}]}],"blog_post_date":"2016-10-25","tags":[{"tag1":{"tag":"Product Updates","_linkType":"Link.document","_meta":{"uid":"product-updates"}}}],"_meta":{"uid":"droplet-tagging-organize-your-infrastructure"}}},{"node":{"author":{"_linkType":"Link.document","author_name":"David E. Worth","author_image":{"dimensions":{"width":250,"height":250},"alt":"David E. Worth","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/88908d6f279ad5cae0d19e5f8f8193854aa2d489_da3f9c3ffc8b92a283a0dc067f6750f7.jpg?auto=compress,format"},"_meta":{"uid":"david_e_worth"}},"blog_header_image":{"dimensions":{"width":735,"height":392},"alt":"user data automation illustration","copyright":null,"url":"https://images.prismic.io/www-static/2b415496-24d9-4fdf-95c5-2ce9041bf814_user-data.png?auto=compress,format"},"blog_headline":[{"type":"heading1","text":"Automating App Deployments with User-Data","spans":[]}],"blog_post_content":[{"type":"paragraph","text":"Automating common development tasks such as building, testing, and deploying your application has many benefits, including increasing repeatability and consistency by removing the potential for interference by \"the human element.\" Deploying your applications by running a single command from the commandline means that your team can spend their time working on the app and rather than the care and feeding of installations.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"There are some very convenient use-cases for creating new Droplets and automatically running applications on them. Your team may want to deploy a feature-branch containing new customer or user-facing code in order to get feedback or stand up a demo-instance of your product for a customer at the touch of a button. This blog post will cover how you can accomplish these and other use cases with the DigitalOcean API.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Mitchell Anicas has written about using Metadata via the API in the DigitalOcean Community. With that as a starting point, we can create some workflows that automatically deploy applications to Droplets.  With the DigitalOcean API and `CloudInit` accessed via User-Data we can","spans":[{"start":40,"end":60,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduction-to-droplet-metadata"}},{"start":236,"end":245,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CloudInit"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"- Get an application or source code onto a Droplet","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"- Run an application in a Docker container so that it \"just works\" with a","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"single API call","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"- Setup configuration management tools automatically","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"heading3","text":"Getting your application code to the Droplet","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Before we can run our application, its source code or binary needs to be on a Droplet.  As Mitchell described, spinning up a new Droplet via the API is very simple so our only modification will be in setting up an application stored in public version control, specifically GitHub.  If your project happens to be on another service such as BitBucket or another hosted version-control service the appropriate changes should be simple.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Suppose I have a public GitHub repository housing a Rails application that I would like to deploy to a Droplet via the API.  Using the User-Data functionality I can simply install Git and clone the repository in the `runcmd` block of the Cloud Config:","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"```[html]{`","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    curl -X POST https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets \\  ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \\","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    -H 'Authorization: Bearer <MY TOKEN>' \\","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    -d '{\"name\":\"example.com\", \"region\":\"nyc3\", \"size\":\"512mb\",","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"         \"image\":\"ubuntu-14-04-x64\", \"ssh_keys\":null, \"backups\":false,","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"         \"ipv6\":false, \"private_networking\":false,","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"         \"user_data\":\"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    #cloud-config","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    runcmd:  ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"      - apt-get install -y git","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"      - git clone https://github.com/daveworth/sample_app_rails_4 /opt/apps/sample_app_rails_4","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    \"}'","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"`}```","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":" ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"In the case where we are cloning a private repository, we can simply change the `git clone` command to include a token issued by GitHub:","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"```[html]{`","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    git clone https://<MY GitHub TOKEN>:x-oauth-basic@github.com/daveworth/sample_app_rails_4 /opt/apps/sample_app_rails_4  ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    `}```","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Similarly, if we want to deploy a specific feature-branch of the repository we can simply use the `-b` flag to specify that branch:","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"```[html]{`","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    git clone -b feature/some-great-feature https://github.com/our_team/our_big_project.git /opt/apps/our_big_project  ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    `}```","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"heading3","text":"Getting your application running!","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Simply cloning your code onto a fresh running Droplet is nice, but is not nearly as useful as having your application \"just work\" on that Droplet.  We've written fairly extensively about Docker previously, including a Getting Started Guide to using it on DigitalOcean.  Not every image at DigitalOcean supports User-Data but conveniently our Docker Application Image does, allowing you to deploy a running instance of your application on it.","spans":[{"start":162,"end":180,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tags/docker"}},{"start":218,"end":239,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-use-docker-getting-started"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We are going to work through the process of getting an example Rails 4 application up and running on a new Droplet using User-Data and Docker.  ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"I have forked the Sample Rails 4 application from railstutorial to my personal github in the `sample_app_rails_4` repository. In my fork I included a `Dockerfile` which configures a Docker container with all of the application's dependencies, sets up its database, and finally runs the application.","spans":[{"start":50,"end":63,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://github.com/railstutorial"}},{"start":94,"end":112,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://github.com/daveworth/sample_app_rails_4"}},{"start":151,"end":161,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://github.com/daveworth/sample_app_rails_4/blob/master/Dockerfile"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"With that file in the repository, modifying our User-Data to run the application is very simple. First change the image from `\"ubuntu-14-04-x64\"` to an image that ships with Docker (to find those use our `/v2/images` API endpoint with application image filters). In this case we will use `Docker 1.4.1 on 14.04` whose `slug` is `docker`. We can instruct Docker to build and run our container while exposing ports 80 and 443 to the application's HTTP(s) server port (in this case 3000) by changing the `user_data` field in our JSON body as follows.  Walking through the commands below, we first install git and clone down our sample application with it.  We then instruct Docker to build a container from the application, run it, and bind ports 80 and 443 to the rails server running on port 3000.","spans":[{"start":204,"end":260,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://developers.digitalocean.com/#list-all-application-images"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"```[html]{`","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    curl -X POST https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets \\  ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \\","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    -H 'Authorization: Bearer <MY TOKEN>' \\","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    -d '{\"name\":\"example.com\", \"region\":\"nyc3\", \"size\":\"512mb\",","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"         \"image\":\"docker\", \"ssh_keys\":null, \"backups\":false,","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"         \"ipv6\":false, \"private_networking\":false,","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"         \"user_data\":\"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    #cloud-config","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    runcmd:  ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"      - apt-get -y install git","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"      - git clone https://github.com/daveworth/sample_app_rails_4.git /opt/apps/sample_app_rails_4","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"      - docker build -t sample_app_rails_4 /opt/apps/sample_app_rails_4","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"      - docker run --name sample_app_rails_4  -p 80:3000 -p 443:3000 -d sample_app_rails_4","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    \"}'","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"`}```    ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"For the sake of simplicity and brevity in this post, we have simplified the deployed application to use SQLite3 in production.  In the case where you have a more realistic infrastructure including relational databases, key-value stores, full-text search engines, etc, you will need to build separate Docker containers for each and link them up. The [dockerfile project](https://github.com/dockerfile) on GitHub has `Dockerfile`s for many of your favorite projects to help you on your way.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"heading3","text":"Building new Droplets using Configuration Management","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"For larger and more complicated infrastructure many teams will lean on sophisticated configuration management tools to automate everything and refocus their attention on more challenging problems than installing dependencies. The DigitalOcean community has covered several options in their tutorials: Puppet, Ansible, and Chef. Many of those tools include modules for interacting with DigitalOcean already such as Knife's DigitalOcean Plugin and Ansible's DigitalOcean Module but at the time of this writing they do not include User-Data support. Much of the same functionality from our previous User-Data example can be replicated in a Configuration-Management system such as Puppet, Chef, or Ansible.  As the complexity of your configuration grows User-Data alone can become unwieldy. Configuration management tools allow you break your configurations into more manageable units.  ","spans":[{"start":301,"end":307,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/getting-started-with-puppet-code-manifests-and-modules"}},{"start":309,"end":316,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-configure-ansible-on-an-ubuntu-12-04-vps"}},{"start":322,"end":326,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-the-digitalocean-plugin-for-knife-to-manage-droplets-in-chef"}},{"start":414,"end":441,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-the-digitalocean-plugin-for-knife-to-manage-droplets-in-chef"}},{"start":446,"end":475,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"http://docs.ansible.com/digital_ocean_module.html"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"We can use User-Data to install and configure our configuration-management tools, which can in-turn, configure your application.  Using the previous User-Data techniques we can install Puppet, fetch your manifests, and configure the Droplet.  Here we fetch Puppet Lab's package and install it (per their instructions).  We then update Apt and install both puppet and git.  After getting those packages installed, we clone our Puppet manifests and apply them.  After that we are free to do whatever we like with our newly configured Droplet.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"```[html]{`","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    curl -X POST https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets \\  ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \\","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    -H 'Authorization: Bearer <MY TOKEN>' \\","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    -d '{\"name\":\"puppet.example.com\", \"region\":\"nyc3\", \"size\":\"512mb\",","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"         \"image\":\"ubuntu-14-04-x64\",","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"         \"user_data\":\"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    #cloud-config","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    runcmd:  ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"      - wget https://apt.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs-release-trusty.deb","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"      - dpkg -i puppetlabs-release-precise.deb","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"      - apt-get update","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"      - apt-get -y install puppet","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"      - apt-get -y install git","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"      - git clone https://<Our Team Token>:x-oauth-token@github.com/our_team/puppet_manifests.git /etc/puppet/manifests","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"      - puppet apply /etc/puppet/manifests/site.pp","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"      - # ... do something with your newly configured infrastructure... for instance, setup some containers!","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    \"}'","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    `}```","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"heading3","text":"Packaging our Application for easy deployment","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Because all of our work is being executed with standard tools like `curl`, we can codify it in a simple shell script which could even be shipped with your open-source projects.  ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Simply including a `deploy_to_do.sh` script in your project  would help new users quickly get a working application on DigitalOcean right from your github repo.  ","spans":[{"start":19,"end":36,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://github.com/daveworth/sample_app_rails_4/blob/master/deploy_to_do.sh"}}]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Here's an example script:","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"```[bin]`{","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    #!/bin/sh","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    # Deploy our cool tool to DigitalOCean.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    # Make sure you set the DIGITALOCEAN_TOKEN environment variable to your API token before running.","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    set -e     # Stop on first error  ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    set -u     # Stop if an unbound variable is referenced","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    curl -X POST https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets \\  ","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    -H \"Authorization: Bearer $DIGITALOCEAN_TOKEN\"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    # ... the rest of your command goes here","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"    `}```","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"heading3","text":"Conclusion","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"The User-Data functionality support in DigitalOcean's API allows you and your team to automatically run your code on Droplets.  By automating the deployment process, your team will be able spin up new instances of your application on Droplets as quickly as running any other command.  From there testing new features or letting prospective clients use their own demo instance is one command away!","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"Have any questions about automating your infrastructure using User-Data? Found any exciting use cases? Let us know in the comment section!","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"","spans":[]},{"type":"paragraph","text":"by David E Worth","spans":[{"start":3,"end":16,"type":"hyperlink","data":{"link_type":"Web","url":"https://twitter.com/david_e_worth"}}]}],"blog_post_date":"2015-01-08","tags":[{"tag1":{"tag":"Product Updates","_linkType":"Link.document","_meta":{"uid":"product-updates"}}},{"tag1":{"tag":"Engineering","_linkType":"Link.document","_meta":{"uid":"engineering"}}}],"_meta":{"uid":"automating-application-deployments-with-user-data"}}}]}}}