August 2024 Summaries

We are excited to announce the Early Access launch of GPU-enabled worker nodes for DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS), now featuring NVIDIA's latest H100 GPUs, designed to democratize AI/ML development within Kubernetes environments and make advanced capabilities accessible to businesses of all sizes. Our new offering provides a scalable, accessible, and cost-effective solution for businesses eager to harness the power of AI/ML within their Kubernetes clusters, tailored to meet the demands of modern AI/ML workloads with enhanced features to support AI/ML training and inference. We invite you to join our early access program and start exploring the possibilities of GPU-enabled worker nodes on DigitalOcean Kubernetes.

You can sign up for DigitalOcean Spaces and receive $200 of credit to try their product over 60 days. DigitalOcean Spaces is now available in the London data center, making it more accessible than ever. This launch allows you to store and serve your data closer to your users in the UK and Europe, enhancing performance. The service is designed for handling large amounts of unstructured data like images, videos, backups, and web assets, with a built-in CDN to minimize page load times and improve performance. DigitalOcean Spaces helps make unstructured data storage and delivery easy, reliable, and affordable, making it an ideal solution for developers and businesses seeking scalable and cost-effective storage.

DigitalOcean has announced the progressive rollout of three new predefined roles for its Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) offering, designed to enhance security, granularize control over resources, and reduce risk. These roles include Modifier, Billing viewer, and Resource viewer, which allow users to update, view billing information, or access resources without deleting them. The new roles provide benefits such as enhanced security, operational efficiency, improved compliance, cost savings, role adaptability, and simplified administration. Customers can invite team members to these new roles, manage their permissions, and adjust roles as needed, streamlining user management tasks and reducing manual errors.

DigitalOcean has launched a new feature called Per-Bucket Bandwidth Billing for DigitalOcean Spaces, which provides an improved level of transparency and control over bandwidth usage. This feature allows customers to better understand and manage their costs by breaking down the costs associated with direct origin traffic, CDN traffic, and daily usage. The feature offers granular bandwidth breakdowns on invoices and month-to-date summaries, enabling users to track and manage their bandwidth costs more effectively and prevent overages. This new functionality is particularly beneficial for agencies, startups, web and media hosting businesses, and SaaS providers who need to accurately allocate costs for client-specific buckets. DigitalOcean aims to simplify cloud infrastructure and make it more accessible and manageable for businesses of all sizes.

This article discusses disaster recovery best practices for DigitalOcean Kubernetes clusters, focusing on the importance of planning and preparing for unexpected events such as data center outages, hardware failures, or security breaches. It highlights the need to identify critical infrastructure pieces, set Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO), regularly test and verify backups, document procedures, and use backup solutions like SnapShooter to simplify the process. The article also addresses common challenges such as data breaches, extended downtime, and certificate rate limit issues, and provides recommendations for mitigating these risks, including using secret managers, persistent volumes, and GitOps models. Additionally, it discusses the importance of high availability, admission webhooks, role-based access controls, and securing the Kubernetes environment to ensure a resilient and secure cluster.

DigitalOcean has announced that it will be renaming its "Managed Database with Redis" product to "Managed Caching", following Redis's updated trademark policy. As of March 20, 2024, all upcoming Redis versions will be released under source-available licenses, and the product will no longer be distributed under the three-clause BSD license. The change in name does not affect the services or functionality provided by Managed Caching, which remains a robust, scalable, and fully-managed database engine for growing digital businesses. Customers do not need to take any action to continue using the service, and it continues to offer automated backups, updates, and monitoring, as well as high availability, automatic failover, and predictable pricing.

The DigitalOcean team successfully migrated their React-based frontend architecture from a monolithic repository to a monorepo, achieving significant benefits in terms of developer velocity and code organization. The migration involved several stages, including making the change easy, colocating apps, and optimizing the monorepo. The team used automation scripts to manage the process, minimizing human error and ensuring reproducibility. Key takeaways include the importance of careful planning, effective communication with developers, and a focus on measurement and optimization during the migration process. The monorepo has enabled faster deployment, easier maintenance, and improved isolation of dependencies, leading to a more scalable and resilient frontend architecture.

Ari Kalfus and Tim Lisko from DigitalOcean share their experience of redesigning their vulnerability management program to incorporate a "security debt" approach, which has resulted in proactive self-service remediation by product owners, improved accountability, and a more nuanced understanding of security risk. By measuring the amount of time security issues remain unresolved past an expected remediation timeframe, teams are incentivized to prioritize high-severity issues first, reducing timeline disruption and enabling business leaders to take ownership of security work. The approach has been well-received by stakeholders across the organization, with some even adopting similar models for their own metrics. DigitalOcean's experience highlights the importance of collaboration, feedback, and continuous improvement in implementing effective vulnerability management programs.

App Platform simplifies the deployment and management of distributed apps by allowing developers to focus on coding and application logic, while App Platform handles the infrastructure. The platform offers a streamlined approach to handling complex architectures through features like Log Forwarding, Insights, and Alerts. By forwarding logs to Managed OpenSearch, users can gain deeper insights and make debugging easier, enhancing observability in their distributed applications.

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!` DigitalOcean aims to support businesses as they grow by providing specialized solutions for running applications with performance and stability. DigitalOcean Droplets are Linux-based virtual machines that run on top of virtualized hardware, allowing users to create new servers or use them as part of a larger infrastructure. The company has introduced Premium Memory-Optimized and Premium Storage-Optimized Droplets, designed for memory-intensive and large data set applications respectively. These droplets offer up to 10 Gbps of outbound data transfer, making them suitable for bandwidth-intensive use cases such as streaming and gaming. They are now available in multiple data centers, including AMS3, SFO3, LON1, and SGP1, and can be easily used with the control panel. DigitalOcean's sales team is also available to discuss using their services in businesses.

This monthly round-up from DigitalOcean covers various topics such as backups, product updates, upcoming events, and new tutorials. The company emphasizes the importance of backups in maintaining customer trust and avoiding privacy breaches. It highlights its robust backup solutions, including Backup as a Service (BaaS), and provides resources for learning more about these services. Additionally, the round-up mentions new features like GPU Droplets, HIPAA Covered Products, and the Beta release of the Global Load Balancer. It also promotes various training sessions, webinars, and surveys to engage with developers and businesses. Overall, this round-up aims to provide valuable information and resources for DigitalOcean customers and users.