May 2019 Summaries

The traditional boundaries of the cloud are being blurred and extended out to potentially millions of endpoints with the rise of IoT technology. Advances in IoT software tools and platforms have led to an infrastructure where workloads can run on physical devices while still maintaining a connection to the cloud. Vitalpointz, an advisory board member at Vitalpointz, offers solutions for establishing a robust IoT infrastructure, including device onboarding, MQTT traffic ingestion, user authentication, and data visualization. Their vitalpointz IoT Core Lite product is now available as a 1-Click App in the DigitalOcean Marketplace, allowing developers to quickly build IoT infrastructure and focus on application development.

DigitalOcean has announced that its Managed Kubernetes service is now production ready and generally available. The company's Kubernetes service allows users to spin up clusters in each city where they have a data center, including New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, London, Frankfurt, Bangalore, and Toronto. Additionally, the platform supports the latest Kubernetes release, 1.14, which introduced 31 enhancements to the container orchestration platform. DigitalOcean also provides an integrated monitoring service that automatically provides insights and alerts for clusters. The company is working on additional features such as auto-scaling and a Container Registry.

On June 6, 2019, DigitalOcean announced the completion of Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) mitigations across their entire platform. The MDS vulnerability, also known as ZombieLoad, could potentially allow attackers to access sensitive data and secrets. DigitalOcean has been working closely with Intel to understand the impact of these vulnerabilities and develop appropriate mitigation strategies. They have received updated microcode from Intel and developed a set of kernel updates to address the issue. Users are advised to ensure their Droplets are up to date and secure, especially if running multi-tenant applications or untrusted code inside their Droplet.

Laurel Kiskanyan, Senior Recruiter at DigitalOcean, shares her experience as a working parent in the tech industry and highlights aspects of the company's culture that she finds particularly welcoming. These include a non-judgmental zone, flexibility, a comfortable work environment, generous parental leave, and a sense of real community among employees. The company's inclusive culture makes all employees feel valued as individuals rather than just workers, which is especially important for working parents who need support in balancing their professional and personal lives.

DigitalOcean has introduced new features to its Managed Databases for PostgreSQL service, including a free integrated monitoring service that provides insights and allows users to set alerts for their databases. The company also announced the general availability of this service. Additionally, Spaces object storage is now available in Frankfurt. DigitalOcean's next priority for Managed Databases is to support running databases in a Private Network and plans to add support for additional database engines such as MySQL and Redis.

Mark Templeton has decided to step down from his position as CEO at DigitalOcean due to a personal health issue. He will continue in his role during the transition period, helping identify a successor and guiding strategic decisions for the company. Since joining in 2018, Templeton has led significant progress, including launching new products, making acquisitions, and strengthening the executive team. DigitalOcean remains committed to its vision of simplifying modern app development under his leadership.

A free eBook of Python Machine Learning Projects has been released to commemorate the 2019 PyCon conference and the worldwide Python community. The book offers project-based learning opportunities for developers, allowing them to gain hands-on experience with complex, real-world challenges. It includes three Python machine learning tutorials that cover creating a machine learning classifier, building a neural network to recognize handwritten digits, and deep reinforcement learning through building a bot for Atari. The book is Creative Commons licensed, making it freely redistributable and remixable for noncommercial educational purposes.