May 2020 Summaries

Rafael Rosa, Senior Product Manager at DigitalOcean, shares the highlights of May's updates, which include the expansion of their global data center count to 13 with a new SFO3 data center in North America. The company also introduced changes to Reserved IPs billing and updated their Terraform provider. Users can now create root passwords for Droplets, making it easier to access them, and there are several new preconfigured 1-Click Apps available in the Marketplace. Additionally, DigitalOcean has added a range of new apps and tools to its platform, including webserver managers, databases, and security solutions, as well as a stable Live Support Chat solution and a distributed computing project for COVID-19 research. The company invites users to try out their new SFO3 data center and provide feedback on product updates and ideas.

The DigitalOcean team has introduced Walrus, a reimagined design system with accessibility and mobile-readiness at its core. This new design system aims to reflect the company's values of simplicity, trust, respect, and love. Guiding principles were established to guide the design of individual components and foundations in the new system. Accessibility for all is critical, with a focus on color contrast and usage, as well as defining aria roles and screen reader behavior. The design process now includes peer review, where designers review each other's work against a set of criteria before it is implemented by the frontend engineering team. Walrus components are mobile-first, enabling users to build experiences from any device. The design system will be gradually rolled out in the coming months, with plans to eventually open source it.

DigitalOcean provides a managed database service that allows developers to offload complex database administration tasks to the company. The managed databases are created, backed up, secured, and made highly available by DigitalOcean, enabling developers to focus on their applications. The service is designed for customers who want to reduce latency, improve security, and increase availability of their customer-facing apps. However, it may not be suitable for low-traffic personal blogs or prototyping phases where cost is a concern. The managed databases start at $15/month and have various features such as automatic backups, encryption, software updates, and traffic failover.

DigitalOcean is expanding its presence in San Francisco by launching a new data center, SFO3, which will offer modern infrastructure and services such as Droplet VMs and DigitalOcean Kubernetes. The company has started running low on capacity in the city due to its rapid growth, and this new center aims to address that issue. With SFO3, users can set up multiple private networks for their applications, providing isolation between them. The data center is now available for provisioning, allowing users to spin up resources immediately. This expansion is part of DigitalOcean's efforts to satisfy the demands of its growing customer base in North America.

At DigitalOcean, they initially offered a simple networking solution with public interfaces and v4 addresses that were publicly routable on the internet, but as they scaled, this simplicity created performance and reliability challenges due to issues such as IPv4 address scarcity and scalability limitations of layer-2 networking. To address these challenges, they adopted a software-defined networking (SDN) approach using label switching in conjunction with a layer-3 protocol like BGP, which allowed them to work around hardware limitations while achieving a routed solution for their public Droplet networking, resulting in reduced broadcast and unknown unicast traffic processing, improved CPU stability, and minimal disruption to customers.

do-ssh-alias is a tool that creates SSH aliases for all DigitalOcean Droplets at once, allowing users to easily SSH into them without having to worry about usernames or IP addresses. It depends on the programs jq and doctl, which need to be installed before using do-ssh-alias. The script can be downloaded from GitHub or obtained via command line. Users can customize the output by passing options such as -u for SSH username, -i for hostnames to ignore, and -s for generating additional aliases with a specified suffix stripped. This tool is useful for managing multiple Droplets and their configurations.

In April, DigitalOcean launched several new products and features. Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is now available in all regions for free, allowing users to create multiple private networks to isolate workloads. Container Registry is also available to all users, enabling easy storage and management of private container images. Trust Platform provides answers to security and privacy questions, while Spaces CDN has separate caches for unique URLs. DigitalOcean's sign-in experience was redesigned for better user authentication. Load Balancers now support keepalive for backend connections over HTTP, improving performance and resource efficiency. Several new preconfigured 1-Click Apps were launched in the DigitalOcean Marketplace, including Jitsi, Minecraft server, Magento, ClassicPress by OpenLiteSpeed, Django Quickstart App, WordPress, Bugfender, Krill, QCObjects, RoboMotion RPA, Snapt Aria, Snapt Nova, and Erxes.