2017: What's Shipping Next on DigitalOcean

The start of a new year is a great opportunity to reflect on the past twelve months. At the beginning of 2016, I began advising the team at DigitalOcean and I knew the company and the products were something special. I joined DigitalOcean as the CTO in June 2016 and our engineering team was scaling rapidly, teams were organizing around new product initiatives, and we were gearing up for the second product to be shipped in our company’s history: Block Storage.

Going from one great product to two in 2016 was a major shift for DigitalOcean and the start of what’s going to be an exciting year of new capabilities to support larger production workloads in 2017.

The “DO-Simple” Way

In the coming year, we are not only strengthening the foundation of our platform to increase performance and enable our customers to scale, we are also broadening our product portfolio to offer services we know teams of developers need. However, we are not just bringing new products and features to market; we are ensuring that what we offer maintains the “DO-Simple” standard that our customers expect and appreciate.

What does DO-Simple mean? At DigitalOcean, we are committed to sticking to our mission to simplify infrastructure and create an experience that developers love. We are challenging the status quo and disrupting the way developers think about using the cloud. This is an exciting chapter for our company and something we believe sets us apart in the market. We want developers to focus on building their applications, not waste time and money on setting up, configuring, and monitoring. Writing great software is hard. The cloud that software runs on should be easy.

2017 Product Horizon

With distributed systems spread over thousands of servers in 12 datacenters across the world, we have valuable operational knowledge on managing infrastructure at scale. We believe our users can leverage the work we do in-house to manage their own infrastructure. Just this month, we released an open source agent that lets developers get a better picture of the health of their Droplets. We also added several new graphs to the Droplet graphs page and made the existing graphs much more precise. Having visibility into your infrastructure is only the first step, knowing when to act on that information is just as important. That’s why later this quarter, we will be releasing additional monitoring capabilities and tools to better manage your Droplets in the DO-Simple way you expect. (Learn more about Monitoring on DigitalOcean.)

As we approach one million registered users and more than 40,000 teams of developers over the last 5 years, it is critical that we give our users the tools, scale and performance that are required to seamlessly launch, scale and manage any size production application. We have more and more customers managing complex workloads and large environments on DigitalOcean that would benefit from a Load Balancer. You can now request early access to Load Balancers on DigitalOcean here.

We aren’t stopping at just adding load balancing to our offerings in 2017. We have a number of important capabilities we’re working on to to meet your high availability, data storage, security, and networking needs. Additionally, we will continue to iterate and invest in our Block Storage offering by making it available in more datacenter locations around the world.

Feedback Matters

We believe in building a customer-first organization that is committed to transparency. Therefore, I will continue to share more updates to our roadmap throughout the year. We have an iterative product development approach and engage our customers in many ways as part of the product prioritization and design process. The developer’s voice matters at DigitalOcean. We don’t assume that we have all the answers. Talking with and listening to the people who use our cloud day in and day out plays a major role in creating the simple and intuitive developer experience we strive to maintain. In the months to come, we will be engaging our customers through each product beta and general release.

Excited about what’s coming? Have ideas about what we should do next? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

Happy coding,

Julia Austin, CTO