March 2014 Summaries

Zhanna Schonfeld, a creative director at DigitalOcean, was tasked with launching the company's new website in under a week amidst a Series A round. With only a few months of experience at DigitalOcean, Zhanna successfully created a beautiful and user-friendly website that embodies the company's core values of simplicity and love. Her approach to design emphasizes testing and metrics-driven decisions, as well as putting the user at the forefront of the experience. Through her work on the new website, Zhanna has become an invaluable asset to the team, bringing her UX philosophies and design expertise to drive outstanding upgrades to the community platform. Despite her rapid rise to prominence, Zhanna remains humble and focused on delivering exceptional results for DigitalOcean.

DigitalOcean recently demoed their PaaS / provisioning offering at a NY Tech Meetup, showcasing instant provisioning of apps and services with real-time discovery and configuration of connected services. The demo was powered by the open source project Flynn, based on Docker, etcd, and other components. This new system aims to reduce wait times for spinning up virtual private servers (VPS) from under a minute to less than a second, allowing easy scaling out across droplets without needing to spin up new servers. The system is designed to be user-friendly, even for those unfamiliar with Docker, and provides real-time discovery of services, enabling dynamic reconfiguration as backing services come online or offline.

The DigitalOcean team is launching a new website with improved community functionality and a sleek design, aiming to make the platform more welcoming and interactive for users. The company plans to expand its support services by hiring more engineers and staff, while also investing in tutorials, open-source projects, and events. Over the next year, the community will undergo significant changes, including the addition of social features, revamped tutorials, and Q&A sections, with user profiles allowing members to track their activity and share information. The company is placing its new website in beta mode, inviting users to provide feedback on comments, bug reports, and suggestions for future improvements.

DigitalOcean has closed a $37.2MM Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from existing investors IA Ventures and CrunchFund. The company was founded in 2011 with a mission to simplify the cloud infrastructure for developers. With a focus on user experience and simplicity, DigitalOcean grew rapidly after launching its SSD-powered cloud, and has since achieved significant milestones such as launching over 1 million virtual servers and processing 18 million events. The funding will be used to expand the engineering team, build services that make developers' lives easier, and support the community through conferences, meetups, and sponsorship of developer initiatives.