June 2024 Summaries

DigitalOcean has strengthened its partnerships, including the collaboration with PureDome to enhance endpoint security and cloud services for startups. The partnership also offers advanced protection, global reach, scalability, access to cutting-edge technologies, and compliance to meet regulatory requirements. Additionally, DigitalOcean is assisting in the migration of Azure Media Services to its platform through a user-friendly interface and global network reliability. The company has also welcomed several new partners to its partner family, expanding its list of world-class brands, including Ashewa Technology Solutions SC, Captain Spec, WEWP, Iotree Minds LLP, Finecons Private Ltd, Black Hawk, Negócios Digitais LTDA, Seertree Global Services, Iynosis Technologies, Caystard Group, Commerce Right, MusQueteer, CLOUDOFIN, MS2 Digital, Creole Studios, B Systems, Gaiasce company Gss subsidiary, Kodelauget AS. These partners can leverage DigitalOcean's developer-friendly products and global community to grow their revenue and deliver exceptional products to their customers.

DigitalOcean has announced the release of the fifth generation of Intel's Xeon Scalable Processors, codenamed Emerald Rapids, to its premium dedicated fleet. The new processors deliver impressive performance gains over prior generations and will result in significant performance and experience improvements for DigitalOcean users and their customers. With the introduction of these new processors, DigitalOcean is also introducing 80 PLUS Titanium Grade power supplies, which are on average 2% more efficient than Platinum, reducing power consumption and environmental impacts. The Emerald Rapids processors demonstrate a roughly 30% improvement in throughput per system for most benchmarks and show marked improvements in core performance and storage performance over the previous Ice Lake generation. The pricing for Droplets has not changed with the introduction of these new processors, allowing users to deliver faster customer experiences without increasing costs.

At DigitalOcean, they aim to support founders and businesses in navigating the ever-evolving tech landscape by providing a comprehensive suite of solutions and tailored support. The company is now offering a limited-time partnership opportunity to Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), which includes free environment assessment and migration services, up to $10,000 in marketing funds, access to their developer community, early access to new product releases, and strategic partnerships. By partnering with DigitalOcean, businesses can accelerate growth, enhance their value proposition, and stay ahead of the curve with the latest technologies.

DigitalOcean has launched Managed OpenSearch, a comprehensive solution designed to simplify log analysis, troubleshooting, and application performance optimization. This platform makes it easy to gather and analyze application logs, providing features such as robust search functionality, customizable log retention, enhanced security, scaling capabilities, and integration with multiple sources. Successful customers like Gleap and RepostExchange have leveraged Managed OpenSearch to streamline their log management, reduce latency, improve security, and gain real-time insights into their data. With predictable pricing and flat rates, this solution offers a cost-effective way for growing digital businesses to optimize their application performance and make data-driven decisions.

DigitalOcean has introduced a major new feature called log forwarding for its Managed Databases service, allowing users to centralize log management and transmit log data to third-party log management providers. This feature enables customers to leverage log forwarding to send logs to popular solutions like OpenSearch, Papertrail, Datadog, and Logtail, providing a wealth of benefits for application troubleshooting, security monitoring, and performance optimization. With log forwarding, users can seamlessly configure log forwarding directly from their managed database through the DigitalOcean API or within the App Platform user interface, forward logs to DigitalOcean Managed OpenSearch, or any external provider that suits their needs. Log forwarding empowers a wide range of use cases for DigitalOcean's Managed Database and App Platform customers, including ISVs, IoT businesses, marketing analytics teams, SaaS applications, and SMB customers who utilize both Managed Databases and App Platform, providing improved log visibility to enhance troubleshooting, security threat detection, and data-driven decision-making.

DigitalOcean has announced two new features for its Managed Database for Redis offering: the ability to add up to two additional nodes to existing clusters, and support for using standby nodes to serve read requests. These enhancements aim to increase scalability, performance, and availability of Redis clusters and applications, empowering developers to build more performant and scalable applications. Adding a standby node is simple and can be done through a guided process, while using standby nodes for reads can improve overall performance and responsiveness by offloading read traffic from the primary node.

DigitalOcean has announced the availability of two new feature enhancements to its Managed Service for MongoDB: MongoDB 7.0 and advanced configuration options. These updates aim to improve the user experience, particularly with enhanced performance, scalability, security, and customization capabilities. With these features, users can now deploy MongoDB 7.0 on DigitalOcean, which introduces substantial improvements in handling time-series data, including better storage optimization, compression, and query performance, as well as greater scalability and overall enhanced performance. Additionally, advanced configuration options provide users with granular control over their database environment, allowing them to tailor settings and configurations to their exact specifications or application needs. These features are designed to empower businesses to maximize the value of their database investment, drive innovation, and quickly adapt to changing application and database needs.

Microsoft has declared the planned retirement of Azure Media Services by June 30, 2024, emphasizing the need for a seamless transition. DigitalOcean is highlighted as a natural choice for migration due to its robust infrastructure, customer success commitment, transparent pricing models, and seamless integration with Ant Media Server. To transition, users can create an Ant Media Server Enterprise Edition Droplet on DigitalOcean, choosing a suitable instance type based on their use case. The platform offers strong reliability, performance, flexible pricing, and comprehensive support, ensuring uninterrupted streaming services even during peak demand.

The partnership between PureDome and DigitalOcean aims to simplify the digital transformation journey for startups, developers, and growing digital businesses by protecting their digital assets. This collaboration integrates PureDome's advanced security expertise with DigitalOcean's robust cloud services and infrastructure, enabling organizations to achieve a cloud-native experience without compromising on top-tier security. The partnership benefits from DigitalOcean's global data centers, scalable cloud services, access to cutting-edge technologies, compliance certifications, user-friendly interfaces, and reliable infrastructure, making it easier for customers to implement and manage their security solutions.

This article is part of a 6-part series on DigitalOcean Kubernetes best practices targeted at SMBs and startups. The series covers various aspects of Kubernetes adoption, including scaling, observability, reliability, disaster recovery, security, and more. In this fourth segment, the focus is on scalability, with an emphasis on challenges faced by small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and strategies for addressing these challenges. Key points include adhering to well-established practices in Kubernetes and cloud-native computing, utilizing autoscaling mechanisms such as Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) and Cluster Autoscaler (CA), optimizing application start-up time, scaling DNS at three layers, and implementing network load testing and resilience measures to handle Kubernetes API latency and failures. By following these best practices, SMBs can build Kubernetes environments that effectively handle the demands of their growing business.