What is Digital Ocean?

Category: Programming | Posted date: 2023-04-19 20:11:34 | Posted by: Admin

Digital Ocean offers a variety of services, its main products are for hosting applications and websites.



What is the Digital Ocean?

The infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform from DigitalOcean Inc., a cloud computing provider with global data centers and headquarters in New York City, is available to software developers. Open-source programmers favor DigitalOcean, which rivals Amazon Web Services (AWS) in popularity. Open-source programmers favor DigitalOcean, which competes with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Although DigitalOcean offers a variety of services, its main products are for hosting applications and websites. Developers launch a private virtual machine (VM) instance, referred to by the firm as a droplet, to deploy DigitalOcean's IaaS environment. Although they don't offer Microsoft Windows instances, DigitalOcean Droplets are identical to Azure or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances.

The size, location, and Linux operating system (OS) that the droplet will run on are all determined by the developers. Alternatively, developers can construct droplets from pre-existing VM images that have pre-installed applications -- a feature DigitalOcean refers to as one-click apps -- rather than selecting a Linux distribution.


The five droplet plans that Digital Ocean provides are as follows:

  1. Basic is adaptable and ideal for businesses with low computing demands who want to host websites and staging environments.
  2. For production applications that require reliable compute performance, General Purpose is created.
  3. CPU-Optimized. For CPU-intensive tasks that require predictable performance and rely more on the CPU than random access memory or input/output, CPU-Optimized is a good fit.
  4. For tasks with significant memory utilization but low to moderate CPU usage, Memory-Optimized is a good choice.
  5. Storage-Optimized combines non-volatile memory express and parallelism to increase disk performance to be quicker than solid-state drives, and it provides a minimum of 150 GB storage for each dedicated vCPU.


What is the purpose of DigitalOcean?

Products from Digital Ocean can be used for the following things, among others:

  • to create VMs;
  • to provision and deploy Kubernetes clusters;
  • to manage databases;
  • to build and deploy apps with App Platform;
  • for object and block storage;
  • for networking tools like virtual private cloud, load balancers, and firewalls; and
  • for a host of different developer and monitoring tools.

Developers can also use an open-source application program interface (API) and the DigitalOcean administration panel to administer and keep track of their droplets. The control interface allows programmers to scale and rebuild droplets in reaction to changes in workload, perform backups, and reroute network traffic across droplets.


Digital Ocean products

The following goods are also available from DigitalOcean in addition to Droplets:

  • Kubernetes - Users can deploy Kubernetes clusters using the vendor's managed Kubernetes service, DigitalOcean Kubernetes.
  • App Platform - The platform as a service (PaaS) solution known as App Platform allows users to publish code to the provider's servers. App Platform can also automatically analyze code from GitHub, public repositories, and GitLab, publish applications to the cloud, and publish container images.
  • Storage - For storage, DigitalOcean provides two options. Users can assign more volumes to droplets using block storage, and big data volumes can be stored using object storage, which is a storage service.
  • Content delivery network - Users can access a network of edge servers that transmit their data through the Spaces content delivery network (CDN).
  • Managed databases - The requirement for administrators to undertake maintenance, configuration, and database installation is reduced by this fully managed database cluster service.
  • Networking - This comprises traffic filtering, load balancing, and tools for controlling application traffic flow using private networks. These tools include floating IPs, cloud firewalls, load balancers, domain name services, and DigitalOcean Virtual Private Cloud.
  • Developer tools - Effective resource management and ecosystem integration are the main objectives of this group of tools. An API, client libraries, command-line interface, custom pictures, GitHub Actions, Terraform Provider, and container registry are some of the technologies that are part of this set.
  • Management tools - With the use of these technologies, users may manage their infrastructure using tools for Monitoring, Projects, and Teams. System metrics are gathered and managed by monitoring. people can manage resources as a group using projects, and teams are a collaboration tool that is available to many people.


The pros and cons of DigitalOcean

Advantages of DigitalOcean products

  • Ease of use - The management panel and user interface have been made to be simple to use.
  • APIs - For automation and integrating with third-party solutions, APIs are available.
  • Documentation - Users can find comprehensive guidelines on DigitalOcean to assist them with challenging settings.
  • Uptime - With 99.99% uptime guarantees for storage and virtual machines, DigitalOcean's availability closely equals that of AWS.


Disadvantages of DigitalOcean

  • Linux-centric - Other OSes like Windows are not natively supported by DigitalOcean tools.
  • Payment options - Customers continue to be charged even after turning off instances since their data is still using up server space. In contrast to other cloud providers, this payment option charges consumers for the block storage connected to the VM rather than the actual virtual machine.
  • Limited locations - Comparatively speaking to other cloud providers, DigitalOcean offers fewer deployment areas.


History of Digital Ocean

A managed hosting company called ServerStack was established in 2003 by Ben and Moisey Uretsky. Their objective was to produce a system for software developers that combined virtual servers with web hosting.

Together with Mitch Wainer, Jeff Carr, and Alec Hartman, the Uretskys started DigitalOcean in 2011. The company would go on to focus on server provisioning and cloud hosting. DigitalOcean's beta version was released in 2012. By the end of August that year, DigitalOcean had launched 10,000 or more cloud server instances and had 400 clients.

2018 saw the launch of DigitalOcean's VM Droplets and Kubernetes container service. The business added the PostgreSQL database as a service in 2019.

In 2018, Ben Uretsky was replaced as CEO of DigitalOcean by Mark Templeton, a former CEO of Citrix. After a year, Yancey Spruill, the previous CFO and COO of SendGrid, took over as CEO from Templeton.

Portable micro-platform as a service provider Nanobox was bought by DigitalOcean in 2019. Nimbella, a supplier of serverless platforms, was bought by DigitalOcean in 2021. The business introduced DigitalOcean Functions in 2022, a serverless platform that allows programmers to create apps without having to manage servers. The learning website CSS-Tricks, which provides free instructional materials and tutorials centered on front-end development, was purchased by DigitalOcean in the same year.

Hacktoberfest, a month-long celebration of open-source software, is organized by DigitalOcean in collaboration with suppliers like Intel, AppWrite, and DeepSource.


Final Thought

With a multitude of walkthroughs, installation instructions, how-to guides, and tutorials, the DigitalOcean documentation contributes to the software's usability. In addition to subjects related to DigitalOcean, the documentation also covers general cloud platform and technological themes. Additionally, DigitalOcean offers a thriving online community that helps with the adoption of cutting-edge technology and provides solutions to queries.