November 2022 Summaries

DigitalOcean is considered more cost-effective for compute than other cloud providers, especially as companies scale with an increase in instances. The company's Droplets offer a healthy balance of CPU and RAM to meet the requirements of various applications, allowing teams to save costs by avoiding paying for resources they won't ultimately need. DigitalOcean also offers competitive pricing models for storage and bandwidth, with services like Volumes and Spaces providing affordable options for businesses to add additional storage capacity without incurring higher costs. The company's support plans are also significantly less expensive than those of other cloud providers, making it an attractive option for businesses looking to optimize their cloud spend and improve their bottom line.

DigitalOcean's commitment to simplifying cloud computing and providing an excellent experience for its customers is at the forefront of all it does, particularly in supporting startups and small businesses. The company uses Let's Encrypt, a Certificate Authority built by the Internet Security Research Group, to provide free, automated certificates for its customers. This integration has been expanded over time to include features such as wildcard domains, support for managed MongoDB connections, and automatic certificate renewal, which is done every four hours to ensure that certificates are renewed before they expire. The company's migration to using ECDSA keys instead of RSA with 2048-bit keys has also improved performance by reducing CPU usage by up to 30%. Additionally, DigitalOcean provides tutorials and a Marketplace app for customers who need Let's Encrypt certificates in their Docker containers.

Hacktoberfest #9 has officially ended, and it was a huge success with 146,891 participants from 194 countries contributing to open source projects. The event aimed to support low- and no-code contributions, which saw 54% of registrants interested in participating through these means. Participants earned digital badges for registering and completing PR/MRs, and the event featured community-focused workshops and events, including a weekly livestream with DigitalOcean. The Hacktoberfest Community is active and shared their enthusiasm on social media, citing benefits such as advancing careers, developing new passions, and improving open source projects. The event stringently enforced its rules to prevent spam and remained opt-in, with over 125k repositories opting in on GitHub and another 800 on GitLab. Companies like Appwrite and Docker participated in the event, citing its impact on their open source projects and communities. DigitalOcean looks forward to more community building in the future.

The DigitalOcean Impact team recently highlighted their social impact initiatives at the annual `deploy` customer conference. They announced a new round of grants, interviewed nonprofits and social enterprises, and connected with conference participants in their social impact Discord channel. The team also shared exciting news that DigitalOcean has committed $1M in cash grants to support nonprofits and social enterprises worldwide in 2022, with plans to fulfill its Pledge 1% commitment in the future. Five new grantees were announced across three communities: New York, Denver, and Pakistan, where DigitalOcean is based. The team partnered with organizations like the Bronx Community Foundation, GreenLight Fund, and Edhi Foundation to support digital equity initiatives, flood relief efforts, and community rehabilitation programs. The event also featured a panel discussion on reducing complexity in nonprofit work and a showcase of DigitalOcean customers' experiences with cloud hosting.

The DigitalOcean team has launched a new control plane for their Kubernetes platform, which offers automatic healing and recovery, dynamic resource allocation, and quick feature updates. The new control plane provides High Availability (HA) capabilities, eliminating the single point of failure that exists in traditional Kubernetes clusters. HA replicates control plane components to ensure resilient clusters, increasing fault tolerance and protecting against control plane outages. DigitalOcean is committed to partnering with customers on their Kubernetes journey, accelerating growth, and scaling businesses, offering a 99.95% uptime SLA for HA-enabled clusters and a free control plane that only charges for underlying usage of products like nodes and Load Balancers.

The team at DigitalOcean has been working on new feature enhancements and product updates, including a new generation of AMD Droplets with improved performance, increased storage throughput limits for Spaces and Volumes, the addition of periodic functions to Serverless, and the introduction of AlmaLinux OS images. To support growing businesses, DigitalOcean is also offering more flexible support plans, including Free, Standard, and Premium options, as well as a limited-time promotion of two free months of service for qualifying startups. Additionally, scheduled functions are now available in Beta, allowing developers to schedule functions at a desired time via Cron expressions, while long-running functions have seen an increased maximum possible timeout from 30 seconds to 15 minutes.

DigitalOcean has announced a significant increase in performance for its Volumes Block Storage and Spaces Object Storage services. The company's Volumes service, which provides high-performance block storage, now supports up to 10,000 Input/Output Operations per Second (IOPS) and 450 MBps throughput, with the ability to burst to 15,000 IOPS and 525 MBps in burst mode. In contrast, Spaces Object Storage has seen its Requests Per Second (RPS) metric doubled, allowing for improved performance in serving static assets, storing user-generated content, and hosting applications that require low latency and high throughput. These updates aim to address the growing storage needs of businesses and provide a competitive edge for developers who rely on DigitalOcean's platform.

DigitalOcean has announced its first data center in Sydney, Australia (SYD1), expanding its global footprint to fifteen data centers across nine regions. This new facility aims to simplify cloud computing and deliver fast, reliable, and superior experiences to customers in the region. With excellent network connectivity, high network throughput, peering with hyperscalers, quick failovers, security, and privacy features, SYD1 is designed to provide best-in-class performance for startups, SMBs, and developers in Australia and New Zealand. The data center's location takes advantage of a growing cloud computing market, a healthy startup ecosystem, and rich telecommunications connectivity options, making it an ideal choice for DigitalOcean to establish its presence in the region.

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try out DigitalOcean's products over a period of 60 days. DigitalOcean was recently featured on the Emmy-nominated series Tomorrow's World Today, which explores global innovations shaping the world of tomorrow. The show highlighted the technology behind cloud computing and discussed some of DigitalOcean's most popular cloud tools, including Droplets and managed Kubernetes. Additionally, the program showcased Hatch, DigitalOcean's global startup program, and the role of the Customer Success and Solutions teams in helping businesses scale on the platform.

DigitalOcean's Senior Technical Writer II, Alex Garnett, shares his experience writing for the company's community website, which provides thousands of tutorials on various cloud topics. As a technical writer, Alex takes complex concepts and makes them usable by a broader audience, often covering popular and useful content. He enjoys making content more accessible to people and writing about complex topics in an easy-to-understand way. Alex credits his career transition from digital archivist to technical writer to the Recurse center organization, which he attended during his career change. Outside of work, Alex enjoys traveling, photography, and training in Krav Maga, as well as collecting kitschy items like vintage advertising. He values the team culture at DigitalOcean and finds it enjoyable to work with a company that shares its commitment to simplicity for developers.