January 2018 Summaries

The DigitalOcean team has launched the Sailor Certification Program, a two-hour interactive training session designed to optimize the interview experience for both employees and candidates. The program aims to ensure consistency in hiring processes, minimize unconscious bias, and foster meaningful interview discussions. By completing the program, interviewers will gain access to a dedicated Slack channel and resources to help them assess talent, make great hires, and maintain a positive candidate experience. The program has received overwhelmingly positive feedback from participants, with many reporting newfound knowledge and confidence in their interviewing skills. The team is committed to continuous improvement and scalability, with plans to evolve the program for 2018 based on feedback and growth.

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days! We’re excited to announce that Spaces is now available in our Singapore datacenter, giving developers and businesses global reach to affordable and scalable object storage. Since our initial launch in September, Spaces has grown in popularity with both existing and new customers—over one billion objects have been stored in Spaces—and it’s no wonder; object storage is critical to delivering web assets, backing up data and even storing mission-critical event logs in the cloud. Hosting storage close to your applications and customers will improve their overall experience. We’ve expanded into Europe by making Spaces available in AMS3, added CORS support, and an upgraded upload experience to the Control Panel. We’re currently working on other features and capabilities which will come out soon.

The go-libvirt project is an open source Go interface to libvirt, a popular virtualization library. Initially, the project only implemented a handful of libvirt's API calls, but its developers used code generation to extend it to cover all 400+ API calls using Sun RPC protocol files. The process involved writing a parser generator using yacc and Go's `goyacc` tool, which generated the necessary code for parsing the protocol files. A lexer was also created to tokenize the input stream. The parser and lexer were then used to generate Go code that could interact with libvirt. However, libvirt departs from Sun RPC in its procedure definitions, so a custom approach was taken to parse these. The project's goal is to make go-libvirt more useful to a wider audience through this code generation process.

The company has introduced new pricing and plans for its Droplet hosting service, which offers a range of resources such as CPU, memory, and SSD storage. The updates include 14 new Standard Plans with improved resource balances, three flexible plans priced at $15 with varying CPU and memory combinations, and upgrades to High CPU Plans. These changes aim to provide more flexibility and better price-to-performance ratios for developers choosing where to host their applications. The company is committed to being a leader in the market and will continue to optimize its infrastructure to benefit customers.

Unbabel, an AI-powered human translation platform, is growing and adapting its technology and personnel to meet the demands of a rapidly expanding business. The company's VP of Engineering, Marcelo Lebre, discusses how Unbabel's stack supports its scaling service and addresses the challenges of balancing human expertise with artificial intelligence. As the startup continues to evolve, it prioritizes equal attention to both technical innovation and the people driving the business forward.

Block Storage is now available in the AMS3 datacenter for Droplets, allowing users to scale their storage independently of compute and gain more control over infrastructure growth. This expansion strengthens the foundation of the platform, enabling customers to build and scale larger applications more easily. The introduction of Block Storage in the ninth datacenter marks a significant milestone in the platform's focus on performance and scalability, following years of engagement and user adoption since its launch in July 2016.

Shiven Ramji, the Head of Product at DigitalOcean, is reflecting on the company's accomplishments in 2017 and previewing its plans for 2018. In 2017, DigitalOcean shipped more products and features than ever before, including Load Balancers, Monitoring and Alerts, Cloud Firewalls, and Spaces. The company also expanded its availability of Block Storage to additional regions and introduced High CPU Droplets that deliver the best price-to-performance ratio for production applications. Shiven highlights the importance of listening to feedback from developer communities in driving product development and growth. In 2018, DigitalOcean aims to make it simple for businesses to scale their applications in production, with a focus on simplicity, elegance, and security. The company plans to introduce new Droplet plans, expand its Spaces service, add virtual network capabilities, and improve its monitoring and security features. Additionally, DigitalOcean is exploring ways to enable partners to provide their tools and services through its platform, and is committed to improving the developer experience throughout the year.

Today, DigitalOcean completed the reboot process in their NYC2 datacenter, marking the completion of reboots for their entire fleet. The company had been working to apply patches that mitigate Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities within their infrastructure. Rebooting activity across all 12 datacenters is now complete, with customers receiving email notifications about the maintenance window for their impacted Droplets at least 24 hours in advance. DigitalOcean has successfully completed reboots in multiple regions, including AMS2, NYC3, SFO1, SGP1, and LON1 datacenters, as part of their efforts to address these security vulnerabilities. The company continues to work on mitigating the risks presented by Spectre and Meltdown and will communicate with users through updates in this blog post and email notifications.