2024: A year of transformational change for DigitalOcean

As I think back on my time since joining as CEO earlier this year, I want to reflect on DigitalOcean’s accomplishments in 2024. From accelerated product development to re-invigorated community efforts, this was a year of transformation for DigitalOcean. As the simplest scalable cloud, DigitalOcean is committed to serving our customers by designing simple yet robust products, helping them succeed through hands-on support, and inspiring them with developer events and educational content. Let’s dive in.

Product features designed to help our customers scale

Product innovation was at the forefront of our accomplishments this year. We made critical improvements in order to better serve our customers as they scale on DigitalOcean, including Role Based Access Control which gives teams granular control over DigitalOcean resources, enhanced backup offerings to ensure you don’t lose critical data, and updates to our ability to process HIPAA workloads. We also introduced several features to improve log management, including Log Forwarding for Managed Databases and Managed OpenSearch.

For those managing global workloads, we were pleased to launch a Global Load Balancer, which allows you to scale your HTTP traffic globally, improving application resilience and minimizing latency. Our reimagined App Platform introduced major updates including autoscaling, Dedicated IPs, and a simplified pricing model designed to help businesses get ideas off the ground quickly. I love hearing how customers like PiCap and ScraperAPI are using App Platform in combination with products like Managed Databases and DigitalOcean Kubernetes in order to rapidly deploy features and scale up to serve their large customer bases.

All of these product enhancements were intentionally designed to make it easier for our customers to scale, while retaining the ease of use DigitalOcean is known for.

New AI capabilities so you can be at the forefront of innovation

Our mission is to simplify the cloud, offering an alternative to the complexities of hyperscalers, while providing scalability and approachability that is unique to DigitalOcean. As we look forward, we plan to do the same for AI. Leveraging the vast potential of AI is no longer an option for scaling businesses—it’s a necessity, and we want to make AI approachable for all. That’s why in October 2024 we launched GPU Droplets, virtualized GPUs that enable anyone to access powerful GPU computing power with just a few clicks.

To further simplify workflows, we introduced a partnership with Hugging Face, which lets you instantly deploy popular Hugging Face models directly to GPU Droplets. For those with advanced AI/ML use workloads, we’ve introduced Bare Metal GPUs, dedicated GPU machines that are powerful and customizable.

We’ve also added GPU-enabled worker nodes to DigitalOcean Kubernetes, and next year will launch our GenAI platform, a simple solution for deploying AI agents and fine-tuning models. As we look to 2025 and beyond, we plan to move from AI infrastructure to AI platforms and AI applications, enabling a broad range of developers to build AI applications more easily than ever before.

Re-invigorated community efforts

When I joined one of my key goals was to re-invigorate DigitalOcean’s developer community efforts. We know developers are at the heart of DigitalOcean, and in 2024 we connected with many of you. We met you through our new meetup program, which has had events in London, Hyderabad, and New York, and our annual Deploy conference, which is growing even more next year with our first hybrid virtual and in-person edition coming in January. I hope you’ll sign up to join us in-person or virtually!

We also ramped up our technical content, providing you with video demonstrations and technical tutorials that give you practical guidance on how to use DigitalOcean products and resolve common developer pain points. Our increasing library of AI/ML content is designed to help developers dive deeper into AI/ML and keep up with the ever-changing trends in the space.

Looking ahead to 2025

I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished in 2024, but our most ambitious plans are yet to come. In 2025 we’ll move boldly and quickly to deliver even more for you, our customers and future customers. As we continue to enhance our offerings, I look forward to connecting with many of you and helping you achieve your goals on the simple cloud that grows with you.