September 2016 Summaries

Clicking the provided link allows users to sign up and receive $200 of credit to try DigitalOcean's products over a 60-day period. Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source software, where contributors can participate by submitting pull requests, bug fixes, or documentation updates to various projects. To participate, users must first sign up on the Hacktoberfest site and then submit four pull requests between October 1st and October 31st to receive a free limited edition T-shirt. The event aims to make it easier for contributors to locate projects that need help and for project maintainers to highlight issues ready for work. Users can connect with other participants by using the #Hacktoberfest hashtag on social media platforms, and DigitalOcean has also provided resources for both project maintainers and contributors on the Hacktoberfest site.

At DigitalOcean, we aim to make it simple and intuitive for developers to build and scale their infrastructure. Recently, we made it easy to scale storage independently from compute at a lower price point with the launch of Block Storage. Now, we're doing something similar for RAM with the release of High Memory Droplet plans, optimized for RAM-intensive use-cases such as high-performance databases or search indexes. These plans start with 16GB and scale up to 224GB of RAM, priced 25% lower than our Standard Plans on a per-gigabyte of RAM basis. We're actively looking at ways to support more specialized workloads and want to hear from developers about how we can better tailor our platform to their applications' needs.

Hatch is an online incubator program designed to support startups in scaling their businesses, providing access to DigitalOcean credit and a range of resources such as technical consultations and mentorship opportunities. The program aims to give back to the startup ecosystem by offering infrastructure credits and educational and networking experiences that will add tremendous value to founders' startups for the long term. Hatch is currently piloting its program to a small group of startups, with eligibility requirements being refined for future bootstrapped and funded startups who apply.

The DigitalOcean team designed a platform built on top of Kubernetes to secure their internal services. They implemented Hashicorp's Vault as a certificate authority (CA) to automate all certificate management, including mutual TLS authentication between etcd and Kubernetes components. The CA structure consisted of two authorities: one for etcd-related certificates and another for Kubernetes components. The team created roles and policies in Vault to control access to the CAs and issued tokens with necessary permissions. Each machine was provided with a Vault token that could be renewed indefinitely, and services were configured to fetch and renew their own certificates using consul-template. The architecture allows for automated certificate issuance, renewal, and rotation, reducing the effort required to set up and maintain many Kubernetes clusters.