November 2013 Summaries

As part of DigitalOcean's yearly tradition, the company is expressing gratitude to individuals who have contributed to its growth and success throughout the year. The community has provided feature suggestions through uservoice, developed the IRC channel community, and helped diagnose edge cases. Three users are specifically thanked for their love and support, as well as three supporters who helped the company grow through trusting in it. The security contributors are also recognized for alerting vulnerabilities to the site, while journalists like Romain Dillet and Frederic L. have broken big stories about DigitalOcean. Collaborators such as Eris DS, sytses, progrium, Ken Cochrane, and epipheo are thanked for their contributions to various projects. Additionally, two individuals with valuable contributions to the Rails community are recognized. The company also thanks its Seed Round Investors at I. A. Ventures for supporting its growth, including Roger, Jesse, Brad, Adrian, and Amy. In a nod to the many people who have played an important role in DigitalOcean's journey, the post concludes by expressing gratitude not just for what has been built, but for seeing the impact of that work.

DigitalOcean has added Dokku, an open source Platform as a Service built on Docker and Heroku Build Packs, to its 1-click image selection on all Droplets. This allows developers to deploy their apps with just a git push in under a minute, supporting multiple programming languages including Ruby, Rails, Node.js, Java, and more. Dokku is fully customizable with various plugins that can be incorporated into the image, making it a free platform where cost only applies to DigitalOcean hosting plans. The addition of Dokku aims to simplify app deployment and push developers to test their apps beyond the initial launch phase.

DigitalOcean experienced a power failure in their NY1 region, affecting network connectivity and causing servers to reboot. The incident was triggered by the failure of UPS 7, which failed to switch to a redundant system, resulting in an interruption of several minutes in power supply. The company's staff quickly responded to the issue, dispatching engineers to the datacenter and working with Equinix to confirm the cause of the problem. After resolving the network issues and rebooting virtual machines, DigitalOcean notified customers who had opened tickets about the majority of the work being complete, and offered assistance for any remaining issues, including filesystem corruption that required manual fsck intervention.

DigitalOcean has partnered with GitLab to offer a 1-click GitLab image that can be spun up in under a minute, allowing users to host their personal git repositories on the platform. This integration is made possible through collaboration between DigitalOcean and Sytse Sijbrandij, the cofounder of GitLab, who worked together to create the image. Users can now easily deploy a Droplet to host their private git repositories using this new 1-click option, which can be accessed by choosing the GitLab image from the Applications tab on the droplet creation page. The partnership also includes a promo code offer for two months free on DigitalOcean, utilizing the `GIT10` code. Users can take advantage of this offer in addition to trying out the new 1-click GitLab image.