June 2014 Summaries

DigitalOcean has found Go to be a favorite programming language, thanks to its growing package landscape and robust standard library. While locating high-quality packages can still be a challenge, the team relies on word of mouth, social channels, and custom solutions like `go-tigertonic` and `testify`. To avoid becoming dependent on external packages, they use Go's interfaces to create their own wrappers, insulating their applications from imported package types. The team has settled on using `godep` to manage dependencies, but acknowledges its limitations. They also appreciate the language's productivity features, such as code completion and formatting tools like `GoSublime` and `Vim Go`, which enhance development experience. With its speed of development, concurrency capabilities, and growing community support, DigitalOcean is recommending Go for teams looking to build distributed systems.

MongoHQ has partnered with DigitalOcean to offer Elastic Deployments, a rapid route to a full power MongoDB system, complete with advanced features like oplog access and high data performance web frameworks. The partnership allows developers to host their applications with agility and flexibility while retaining power on demand. DigitalOcean's fast and convenient cloud technology complements MongoHQ's Database-as-a-Service, enabling users to take advantage of rapid provisioning for cloud instances and easy-to-use dashboards and APIs. With the partnership, MongoHQ is now production ready for DigitalOcean users, offering a seamless experience with features like autoscaling technology and Tier-1 peering. The collaboration between MongoHQ and DigitalOcean has resulted in a smooth rollout, allowing developers to leverage the perfect dovetail of hosting and database provisioning.

The DigitalOcean API has been rewritten from the ground up for version 2, which offers improved features such as a truly RESTful API, OAuth applications, and slugs for referencing sizes and regions. The new API also includes pagination, expanded API coverage including IPv6 actions, and allows users to create and authorize API tokens for authentication. The public beta is now available for testing and feedback, with the goal of refining the direction of version 2 based on community input.

IPv6 addresses are now available for all Droplets in the Singapore region, allowing users to enable IPv6 during creation or add it to existing Droplets without a reboot. This feature will become the standard for new datacenter locations going forward, including several upcoming launches. The first datacenter to support IPv6 is SGP1, running on v1.5 of the backend code base, which provides improved actions and backup service architecture compared to the current v1.0 code. A two-month beta period in Singapore has been completed, followed by a migration phase to the new 1.5 codebase in San Francisco. Community resources are available for users to learn more about IPv6 on Droplets.