October 2014 Summaries

You can sign up for Mesosphere's products and get $200 of credit to try them over 60 days. This allows you to deploy, scale, and manage applications with minimal configuration, using an automated provisioning tool that offers fault tolerance and scalability. With Mesosphere's API, you can manage thousands of Droplets like a single computer, making it simple to run multiple applications and services side-by-side on the cluster. To get started, visit the Mesosphere web page, sign up, and choose from development, highly-available, or custom installation options. The goal is to save time and increase productivity by abstracting DevOps work, allowing you to focus on your applications instead of servers and hostnames.

We're proud to announce our participation in the RIPE Atlas project, a global Internet measurement network that allows us to test and validate access to our data centers from thousands of locations around the world in just minutes. Our networking team initially got involved with RIPE due to their responsibility of allocating IP space in Europe, and we've been running Atlas anchors at our SFO1, SGP1, and LON1 sites. By integrating this new distributed measuring ability with our existing systems, we'll be able to automate connectivity and throughput testing from just about anywhere in the world, improving our ability to detect Internet connectivity issues before they become problematic for customers.

In a significant update, DigitalOcean's metadata service is now live, enabling users to query information about themselves and automate the provisioning process of their servers. This feature allows for improved automation through CloudInit, which can pull down and process user-provided metadata during server bootup. The new functionality is available on Ubuntu 14.04 and CentOS 7 base images, as well as one-click apps based on these releases, with CoreOS servers using a different mechanism. Users can now take advantage of this feature to streamline their server setup and configuration.

The DigitalOcean Student Developer Program offers students free access to top-notch development tools, including hosting credit and special accounts for GitHub, Atom, NameCheap, Sendgrid, and other companies. The program aims to provide a hands-on, professional experience that allows students to learn by doing, while also giving back to the developer community. As part of this initiative, DigitalOcean is providing $100 in hosting credit per student who signs up for the program, with some limitations on promo codes. The goal is to support students' education and make developers' lives better by creating a sense of community.