August 2018 Summaries

DigitalOcean is hosting SREcon EMEA in Düsseldorf, Germany, featuring talks on various topics including post-incident care and fostering mentorship. The event aims to promote a blame-free culture and provide resources for supporting team members after mistakes occur. Keynote speakers include Tom Spiegelman, who will discuss building a fellowship program to mentor and grow SRE teams, and Jaime Woo, who will present "Your System Has Recovered from an Incident, but Have Your Developers?" The event also features lightning talks on various SRE-related topics and highlights the importance of psychological safety and team trust in high-performing teams.

Today, Intel released a statement regarding L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF), a severe security vulnerability that affects many multi-tenant environments running virtual machines, including DigitalOcean. This vulnerability exposes data to any guest running on the same processor core in our environment, which means an attacker could theoretically use one Droplet to view another Droplet's memory. However, they should have no ability to target a specific Droplet or user. We are continuing to work with Intel to ensure our customers are protected against L1TF and are also proceeding with a longer-tail mitigation response aimed at reducing our reliance on hardware to keep both Droplets and data protected. There is currently no action required from our users to protect their Droplets from the L1TF vulnerability. We will continue to share updates here, and will reach out to you directly if we believe there may be any impact to your account, or should you need to take any action. Remediation efforts are expected to be completed within a few weeks, during which time we will take all possible steps to ensure customer Droplets and data remain safe.

Caddy is a modern web-server that provides simplicity and security, with native support for Git and Let's Encrypt. It can be used to deploy a static website synced with a Git repository in under 5 minutes. The process involves downloading the Caddy binary, setting up DNS records, configuring the Caddyfile, installing the Systemd service file, and enabling the server to start on boot. Once set up, Caddy will check the Git repository for changes every five minutes by default, allowing for near-instant updates. DigitalOcean Cloud Firewalls can be configured to secure the server further.

Shiven Ramji from DigitalOcean provides an update on the company's progress and upcoming plans. The roadmap is driven by community feedback, and initiatives include improving Droplet plans, introducing new CPU Optimized Droplets, expanding Block Storage and Spaces object storage, and enhancing Load Balancers. Significant releases have been made to improve developer experience, including the introduction of Projects and a revamped Control Panel Dashboard. DigitalOcean has also announced support for Custom Images, content delivery capabilities in Spaces, and plans for a managed database service (DBaaS). The company aims to simplify application development and scaling, while continuing to address new use cases and customer needs.