February 2019 Summaries

General Purpose Droplets are a new offering from DigitalOcean designed to provide a well-balanced combination of memory, dedicated CPU, and SSD storage resources. These droplets are ideal for various applications such as web apps, databases, in-memory caches, e-commerce sites, analytics applications, and enterprise business applications. They are backed by Intel's Xeon Platinum 8168 processors with a clock speed of 2.7GHz and come in six different configurations ranging from 2 vCPU / 8 GB RAM to 40 vCPU / 160 GB RAM. General Purpose Droplets, along with CPU-Optimized Droplets, form the Performance Class of Droplets that offer dedicated hyper-threads from best-in-class Intel processors in a variety of configurations. These droplets are currently available under Limited Availability and can be provisioned in New York (NYC1) and Frankfurt (FRA1) data centers, with plans to expand globally over the next few weeks.

In this tutorial, we will build a simple Laravel app that displays a contacts list on a page using Eloquent and PostgreSQL's JSON object support. We will learn how to connect Laravel to a DigitalOcean Managed PostgreSQL database cluster, initialize the database with random data using Laravel factories and seeders, and store and read JSON documents in PostgreSQL using Laravel Eloquent. The app will query the database for the contacts and their details.

The article discusses the role of technical writers in creating tutorials and guides for software development, systems administration, and DevOps. It highlights how these writers contribute their real-world experience to help others solve problems they faced on the job. Technical writing is seen as a complementary skill to engineering work that requires authors to understand concepts at a deeper level. The article also introduces DigitalOcean's "Write for DOnations" program, which allows external contributors to write tutorials and get paid while contributing to tech-focused nonprofits.

DigitalOcean introduces Managed Databases, a fully managed and feature-rich database service that enables developers to quickly and easily spin up high-performance database clusters without worrying about the intricacies of database administration. The service initially supports PostgreSQL 10 and 11, with plans for additional engines such as Redis and MySQL in the future. Managed Databases offers worry-free maintenance, high security, easy scalability, automatic failovers, and a simple backup and recovery solution. Pricing starts from $15 per month for a database node or $50 per month for a high availability cluster, with backups included at no additional fee.