December 2022 Summaries

DigitalOcean continued to focus on serving small and medium businesses in 2022, making important steps towards being the ideal cloud for SMBs. The company acquired Cloudways, a managed hosting provider, to enhance its ability to serve small business owners at every stage of their journey. DigitalOcean launched new products and features, including DigitalOcean Functions, which provides high availability control plane for DigitalOcean Kubernetes, and introduced the Partner Pod, a new partner program that gives small businesses more ways to work with them. The company also made updates to its products, such as DigitalOcean Kubernetes, and added two new support levels to its Support Plans, enabling users to get faster response times and dedicated support from technical managers.

As a Customer Success Manager (CSM) at DigitalOcean, Bella Nitonde works closely with startups and small-to-medium businesses to help them achieve their goals on the platform. A typical day for her involves preparing customer meetings and presentations, troubleshooting issues, and advocating for customers through cross-functional teams. She prioritizes empathy, understanding, and prioritization when solving problems, and values collaboration and teamwork within her global team. Outside of work, Bella volunteers to help low-income people manage their finances. With a focus on understanding products, customer needs, and how to drive success, Bella finds joy in her role and feels that DigitalOcean's values are genuinely lived by its employees.

Mastodon is a decentralized, self-hosted social network that has gained significant popularity in recent months as users explore alternatives to traditional social media sites. It is part of the Fediverse, a series of interconnected applications built on top of ActivityPub, and is built using Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, and PostgreSQL. The platform's growth has presented challenges for server operators, including the Hachyderm.io Mastodon community, which experienced intermittent downtime due to scalability issues. However, by leveraging cloud storage services like DigitalOcean Spaces, users can overcome these challenges and ensure the stability of their platforms. DigitalOcean provides a simple way to host a Mastodon server, and its documentation is available for users who want to set up and manage their own instance.

DigitalOcean recently hosted a conference called "deploy" where they explored ways to simplify infrastructure for global development teams, allowing them to focus on their businesses. Attendees heard from builders who shared their experiences with becoming more nimble and building better applications. Keynote speakers discussed challenges faced by founders, developers, and builders, as well as announced grants for nonprofits and social enterprises. Sessions covered topics such as reducing burnout, synthetic data, application architecture, scaling in the cloud, and tech education. The conference also featured a multiplayer programming game called Battlesnake, which demonstrated how DigitalOcean's App Platform enabled global players to compete at a high level. Recordings of all sessions are available on the deploy website for those who missed the event.

In this November update, DigitalOcean has inaugurated a new Australian data center in Sydney (SYD1), increased the power of its storage by up to 50%, and improved performance with Object storage being up to 100% faster. The company has also expanded its global footprint, launched Fedora 37, and introduced the third generation AMD EPYCTM processors in Premium Droplets plans. Additionally, DigitalOcean is offering a choice between Free, Standard, and Premium support plans, and has released PyDO, its official Python API client library. Furthermore, the company's Solutions Experts are available to assist with custom setups, migration, and pricing, while the Mastodon Droplet 1-Click app provides instant global communication for developers.

DigitalOcean is a cloud computing platform that offers simplicity, scalability, and economies of scale to businesses of all sizes, including startups and small-medium businesses (SMBs). It provides an alternative to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is often more complex and expensive for smaller operations. DigitalOcean's pricing model reflects its vision of cloud computing being an enabler of business growth, with affordable pricing that does not tie customers into long-term contracts. The platform offers flexible pricing plans, generous bandwidth allowances, and free resources, making it easier for businesses to scale their cloud footprint without worrying about costs. Additionally, DigitalOcean provides a simple and intuitive billing process, predictable cost model, and personalized support services tailored to the needs of startups and SMBs, which can deliver significant cost savings and ROI.