November 2020 Summaries

"Start-Ups Decoded" is a series of interviews with tech entrepreneurs who share their experiences and insights to inspire budding entrepreneurs. The series features five startups that use DigitalOcean, including Frappe, Quodeck, Marketpulse, MikeLegal, and Datanet. These companies offer solutions in various fields such as app development, gamified learning, financial market analysis, AI-powered legal assistance, and managed services for fantasy sports platforms. The interviews provide valuable lessons on overcoming challenges, achieving milestones, and running a successful startup.

In November, DigitalOcean hosted its first global virtual conference for developers called "deploy." During the event, several new products were announced including Storage-Optimized Droplets, General Availability for DigitalOcean Container Registry, and the Deploy to DigitalOcean button. The company also made numerous enhancements to App Platform, added support for wildcard domains, improved build caching, and introduced a catch-all document feature. Furthermore, they launched many preconfigured 1-Click Apps in the DigitalOcean Marketplace and reduced the prices of Memory-Optimized Droplets by about 11%.

Hacktoberfest is an annual event by DigitalOcean that encourages developers to contribute to open source projects. In 2020, the event saw a record number of participants with over 169,886 people signing up. The event was held virtually due to the pandemic and included livestreams, discussions, and various activities. Participants from around the world contributed to numerous repositories in different programming languages. DigitalOcean also introduced an option for participants to plant trees instead of receiving a t-shirt as part of their efforts to reduce the environmental impact of Hacktoberfest. The event concluded with a series of roundtable discussions and feedback sessions aimed at improving future editions of Hacktoberfest.

Fernando Pimenta, a long-time DigitalOcean customer and community member, shares his experience at the company's first deploy conference. He highlights the good energy and values presented by Yancey Spruill, CEO of DigitalOcean, who spoke about simplicity, openness, inclusion, and responsibility towards customers. Fernando also appreciates the Hub for Good initiative that aided communities worldwide during the pandemic. The event featured presentations on new products, engineering accomplishments, and inclusive learning experiences. Additionally, attendees enjoyed yoga sessions and engaging Discord chats. Overall, Fernando feels happy to be part of the DigitalOcean community and praises the well-planned and caring approach taken for the conference.

The first-ever global virtual conference by Dolphin, called "deploy," took place last Tuesday. It featured speakers from around the world discussing various topics such as personal branding for developers, creating inclusive learning experiences, DevOps in Minecraft worlds, and headless e-commerce. During the event, a session was held on the importance of community initiatives in marketing, emphasizing how understanding customer needs can lead to tailored journeys that result in organic conversions and revenue growth. The focus on self-service solutions and aligning teams to support this approach benefits both customers and businesses by creating a win-win situation with measurable impact on the bottom line.

Intel has released 40 security advisories, including two side-channel issues that could lead to information disclosure. On DigitalOcean's platform, this means a malicious user could use a Droplet to infer partial data of another Droplet on the same physical host. To mitigate these vulnerabilities, DigitalOcean collaborated with Intel to test an updated microcode and deployed it to all affected machines in their fleet. Users do not need to take any action to protect their Droplets from these vulnerabilities.

DigitalOcean has introduced new products and enhancements to its cloud computing platform, including Storage-Optimized Droplets, lower prices for Memory-Optimized Droplets, and the general availability of DigitalOcean Container Registry. The company also released a new button for its App Platform that allows users to deploy apps in one click from public GitHub repositories. These updates aim to simplify cloud computing for developers and businesses, enabling them to focus on creating software that changes the world.

DigitalOcean introduces Storage-Optimized Droplets with NVMe SSD storage for handling large databases, caches, and analytics workloads. These virtual machines offer faster disk performance compared to regular SSDs. Additionally, prices for Memory-Optimized Droplets have been reduced by approximately 11%. Both types of Droplets can be deployed through the control panel, CLI, API, or platform extensions like Terraform provider.

DigitalOcean has announced the general availability of its new product, DigitalOcean Container Registry. This registry is designed to securely store and manage private container images for use with DigitalOcean Kubernetes. The registry offers encryption at rest and in transit, as well as compatibility with Open Container Initiative (OCI) artifacts. Pricing plans include a free plan with one repository and 500 MiB of storage, as well as Basic and Professional plans for larger projects. Unlike other container registries, DigitalOcean allows an unlimited number of collaborators at no additional cost.

DigitalOcean introduces the "Deploy to DigitalOcean" button to assist open source software (OSS) developers in deploying their apps on various cloud platforms. The button is designed to simplify the process of creating and maintaining instructions for app deployment, which can be a challenging task. By embedding this button and associated link in README.md files or web pages, users can focus more on their OSS projects without worrying about writing tasks and updating instructions. There are no costs associated with adding the "Deploy to DigitalOcean" button, and users will be presented with pricing for the DigitalOcean App Platform upon clicking the button. The App Platform supports various popular languages and frameworks and offers three pricing tiers: Starter, Basic, and Professional. Additionally, new features have been introduced for App Platform, such as pre and post deploy jobs, additional pricing plans, and a memory increase for the Development Database.