November 2017 Summaries

DigitalOcean, a cloud infrastructure company, leverages Prometheus and Alertmanager for whitebox monitoring of its services and container clusters. Observability is crucial, comprising logging, metrics, and tracing. The company uses four golden signals (latency, saturation, traffic, and error) to monitor request-based microservices, while also utilizing the USE method (utilization, saturation, and errors) to monitor Kubernetes clusters. This monitoring setup enables the identification of long-term trends, analysis of performance issues, and setting up visualizations, ultimately improving observability and server reliability.

Hacktoberfest 2017 was a highly successful event, with a record-breaking 31,901 participants completing the challenge and contributing to 64,166 projects. The open source community came together to share their experiences, with many developers expressing their pride in participating and making new connections. First-time contributors also shared their stories of submitting their first pull requests, highlighting the sense of accomplishment and community support that comes with participating in Hacktoberfest. As the event continued, meetups were organized in 119 locations worldwide, marking an increase in participation from around the globe. The organizers thanked GitHub for their partnership and expressed gratitude to social media users who encouraged others to participate. With a successful event now behind them, participants look forward to next year's edition of Hacktoberfest.

DigitalOcean's company-wide Hackathons have been a successful event that promotes company cohesion, creativity, and collaboration among employees. The events have seen significant growth in participation over the past year, with 40% of the company's 380+ employees participating in the most recent event. The Hackathons have also yielded innovative and productive outputs, including projects that become part of the company's internal toolset. By providing a relaxed atmosphere for employees to experiment, tinker, and get to know each other, DigitalOcean has given its team permission to create value both for themselves and the company. The events have been successful due to constant iteration and the addition of fun extras, such as technical judges, extended pitching time, and happy hour.

DigitalOcean has announced the expansion of its Spaces object storage service to Amsterdam, with a presence now in both New York and Amsterdam. The service aims to simplify storage solutions for developers by providing automatic scalability, performance, and reliability at an affordable price. With no costs per request and predictable pricing, Spaces offers cost savings of up to 10x compared to traditional storage methods. The service is designed to scale automatically, allowing users to store and serve any amount of data without worrying about scaling infrastructure. DigitalOcean aims to simplify the development process by removing friction from storage-related tasks, making it easier for developers to build great software. Spaces is available in two regions initially, with more global regions planned for early 2018.

DigitalOcean continues to prioritize its growth in the Indian market, hosting a user conference called Tide in Mumbai with over 250 attendees. The event featured talks by startup founders and a campus-wide contest called Campus Champ that aims to identify student developers and entrepreneurs. DigitalOcean is also offering a free webinar series on container orchestration and management, covering topics such as Kubernetes and deploying multi-container applications. The company encourages feedback from its community and invites students from India to participate in the Campus Champ contest, which offers cash prizes and swag.