June 2017 Summaries

Prabhakar (PJ) Jayakumar, DigitalOcean's India Country Manager, reflects on the company's first year in the country, highlighting memorable highlights from engaging with India's growing developer community. This past fall, DigitalOcean organized a "Product-a-thon" contest to identify top student engineers and ran its Hacktoberfest initiative, partnering with IndiaStack for their first-ever hackathon around the Aadhaar Auth API. The company has hosted two editions of its signature Tide Conference, expanded DO Meetups across six cities, added monthly webinars from industry experts, and facilitated workshops, hackathons, and coding contests across India. DigitalOcean is proud to have customers such as NoBroker.in, Betaout, KartRocket, and HackerRank, and looks forward to continuing to empower developers and software companies in the year ahead.

DigitalOcean has introduced Cloud Firewalls, a free service designed to simplify the process of securing Droplets with easily configurable security rules. This service allows developers to define access rules and apply them to all Droplets from a central location, without consuming resources from their Droplets. The principle of least privilege is enforced, where only explicitly defined ports and IPs are accessible, and unauthorized traffic is dropped before reaching the Droplet. Cloud Firewalls can be easily configured using tags, Load Balancers, IP ranges, and individual Droplet names, and also supports multiple Firewalls per Droplet for finer-grained control. The service also offers a command line interface and RESTful API for automation, with plans to integrate it further with other tools. This feature is designed to make security easier to manage at scale, particularly for distributed applications with large numbers of resources.