April 2019 Summaries

GitHub Actions were launched last year and have since been used to build various applications from running tests and linters to more lighthearted use cases. One of the most powerful aspects of GitHub Actions is the ability to compose workflows using multiple actions to accomplish complicated tasks. In this post, we will show how to create a simple continuous delivery pipeline that deploys an application to a DigitalOcean Kubernetes cluster on push to the master branch of a GitHub repository. Along the way, we will dig into some of the details of working with GitHub Actions.

Many agency owners struggle with burnout and profitability due to offering services on a time-based model. To improve their business model, agencies can leverage the 10X Rule by setting bigger goals, increasing client numbers, boosting income and revenue (particularly recurring revenue), automating processes, and ensuring clients' websites run securely and performant. Offering recurring value instead of time-based services is a modern option to help scale an agency. By focusing on results rather than hours, agencies can create better offerings and maintain a more profitable business using recurring revenue.

DigitalOcean has acquired Nanobox, an application deployment and developer workflow automation platform. This acquisition aims to bring modern application development closer to developers worldwide by automating DevOps workflows. The Nanobox technology will help eliminate the burden of managing infrastructure for users, allowing them to focus on creating modern apps. Both companies share a vision and values, with Tyler, the founding CEO of Nanobox, joining DigitalOcean in this journey. Specific product plans have not been disclosed yet, but updates will be shared soon. Developers are encouraged to provide feedback and ideas for future offerings.

DigitalOcean has introduced custom subdomains for Spaces CDN endpoints. This feature allows customers to use their own subdomain URLs to deliver assets from an S3-compatible Space and secure it with a TLS certificate, which can be issued by a CA authority, self-signed, or auto-generated through DigitalOcean's Let's Encrypt integration at no additional cost. Customers can now focus on building great applications rather than fine-tuning infrastructure.

DigitalOcean has introduced General Purpose Droplets with a 4:1 ratio of RAM to dedicated CPU. These new Droplets are now generally available and can be deployed in five global data centers. They are powered by Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 "Skylake" Processors, offering high-performance computing for production-grade applications. General Purpose Droplets provide consistent compute power and are suitable for highly trafficked web and application servers, databases, ad servers, gaming servers, caching fleets, and other time-sensitive use cases. They also include features such as blazing-fast SSD storage, optional Backups and Snapshots, monitoring and alerts, network firewalls, and more.