February 2022 Summaries

Kubernetes is a popular solution for container orchestration and management, with its adoption growing among businesses of all sizes. It helps increase automation and reduce IT costs by enabling companies to scale easily and deploy software quickly. However, it's not suitable for every business or use case. For startups planning high growth, Kubernetes can help achieve their goals with the least amount of added cost and friction. Adopting Kubernetes early on can help avoid technical debt that prevents businesses from responding quickly to market changes. Startups should consider adopting Kubernetes once they have found a product-market fit, have a working application, and are ready to scale. A clear implementation strategy is crucial for managing the complexity of Kubernetes.

DigitalOcean has introduced several new features to its App Platform, a fully managed PaaS offering. These include integration with Glitch for easy app deployment, rollback to previous deployments for improved reliability, support for Managed MongoDB as trusted sources, log forwarding to Logtail, and enhanced security through the latest TLS protocols. The aim is to make it easier for businesses to build and manage their apps while focusing on growth and innovation.

The 2021 DigitalOcean Kubernetes Challenge aimed to provide an opportunity for people with varying levels of Kubernetes experience to try out the technology and participate in a range of challenges. Participants were awarded prizes upon completion of their projects, which included donations to open source projects through Open Collective, gift cards to the DigitalOcean Swag Store, and CNCF Store. The challenge received significant participation with 209 people submitting completed projects. A supportive community was at the heart of the Kubernetes Challenge, with an active Discord room for assistance and encouragement. Some exceptional projects included Dustin Shargool's EFK log monitoring system, David Howell's policy enforcement system with Kyverno, Sudhanva Narayana's installation of the machine learning platform Kubeflow, and Sathyajith Bhat's GitOps CI/CD pipeline. DigitalOcean is reflecting on improvements for future challenges and encourages participants to keep an eye on their Twitter account and the Kubernetes Challenge page for upcoming events.

DigitalOcean is a values-driven company that has transitioned to a remote-first organization during the COVID-19 pandemic. To ensure employees maintain a healthy work-life balance and take time off, they implemented Sammy Recharge Days, where the entire company takes days off throughout the year. This approach has led to increased productivity, reduced attrition, and positive employee feedback. In addition to these recharge days, DigitalOcean offers unlimited PTO, parental benefits, access to mental health applications, a wellness stipend, and generous healthcare plans. The company is expanding its holiday calendar in 2022 and beyond to recognize holidays of significance to different religions and cultures.

DigitalOcean introduces a new feature that enables users to migrate their MySQL, Redis, and PostgreSQL databases from virtually any source to its Managed Databases with minimal downtime and no additional costs. The online migration process involves transferring data from an existing database hosted on DigitalOcean or elsewhere and replicating its contents to the new database cluster. This feature is supported for publicly accessible databases, and users should have the right level of permissions on these databases to start a migration. The Managed Databases pricing starts at $15/month, with no charge associated with migrating data into them.

In January, DigitalOcean made several updates to its products and services. Google Pay was introduced as a payment option for users worldwide. A new base image for Rocky Linux 8.5 x64 is now available in the control panel and API. Load balancers can now be resized once per minute instead of once per hour, allowing faster scaling. App Platform now supports rollback to previous deployments, enabling users to recover from faulty deployments. Trusted sources for Managed MongoDB were added, ensuring more secure apps. New marketplace apps include VictoriaMetrics Cluster, authentik, ls-k8s-webadc, and CyberPanel Joomla. Updates were made to the DigitalOcean Command Line Interface (CLI) and Terraform Provider.

Serverless computing allows developers to build and run applications without managing cloud infrastructure. Function as a Service (FaaS) is a subset of serverless computing that focuses on event-driven triggers where code runs in response to events or requests. FaaS offers the most abstraction for the user and the most specific functionality, allowing developers to focus solely on coding and development for their application while saving costs and enabling auto-scalability without capacity planning or ongoing maintenance. However, it is best suited for simple and repetitive functions with low volumes of requests.