deploy by (and to!) DigitalOcean: our virtual conference showcasing the latest ways to run on DO

Today we broadcast deploy – our 24-hour global virtual conference. I’ll be kicking things off at 10 a.m. EST, and I hope you will join the livestream or otherwise watch later on-demand.

Throughout deploy we’ll share product news, best practices, and expert commentary about cloud computing. In case you are unable to watch, I wanted to share some of what we’re covering during the keynote.

You can DO anything on DigitalOcean

2020 has been a historic year. The pandemic has not only accelerated digital transformation, but it has also propelled cloud computing. The cloud has lowered barriers of entry for developers and entrepreneurs, regardless of their background or expertise.

It’s with great humility that we at DigitalOcean have come to see our cloud computing platform as an open canvas. Our platform gives developers, entrepreneurs and small businesses creative freedom to make incredible things, many of which we can’t even imagine.

Early on in the pandemic, we offered up our cloud free of charge for those of you looking to DO good by building tools to combat COVID-19. One of the first applications to our Hub for Good program came from Bustbyte, a Norway-based software consultancy. Bustbyte founder Michael McMillan told us he needed infrastructure to run an open source app that would allow users to self-report symptoms of the virus. We provided Bustbyte enough free credit that they were able to scale Coronastatus to 35 countries using DigitalOcean Kubernetes and our managed Postgres database.

We’ve since expanded Hub for Good’s scope, and encourage you to apply for the program if you’re working on projects to improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth.

A simpler cloud, built for you and your small business

We created Hub for Good because giving back to the community is part of our core values. These values guide us every day in our mission to simplify cloud computing so developers and businesses can spend more time creating software that changes the world.

Our value of simplicity is the main reason we’ve worked these past few years to evolve DigitalOcean well beyond our initial Droplets. To better support developers of all skills levels as they scale their apps, we now offer a continuum of cloud computing products.

At one end of the spectrum is our growing portfolio of Droplets: virtual machines that give you complete control of your infrastructure set-up. At the opposite end is App Platform, which allows you to deploy apps written in popular programming languages, without having to manage infrastructure. Our managed Kubernetes service is something of a middle ground, which gives you substantial control of your infrastructure, while providing a widely accepted, portable framework for running cloud native applications at scale.

Along with today’s deploy event, we’re introducing new products and enhancements at each stop on this compute continuum.

Storage-Optimized Droplets and lower prices for Memory-Optimized Droplets

Storage-Optimized Droplets feature large amounts of NVMe SSD storage, along with 8GB RAM per dedicated CPU. NVMe takes advantage of parallelism to deliver disk performance that can be an order of magnitude faster than our regular SSDs. This makes Storage-Optimized Droplets great for extra large NoSQL databases, caches, and analytics workloads.

Our Memory-Optimized Droplets also feature 8GB RAM per dedicated vCPU (but lack NVMe), and are great for things like in-memory caches and real-time big data processing. Today we’re making Memory-Optimized Droplets an even better value by reducing prices by about 11%.

This blog post further describes Storage-Optimized Droplets and the new prices for Memory-Optimized Droplets.

DigitalOcean Container Registry is now Generally Available

DigitalOcean Container Registry allows you to securely store and manage private container images and other OCI-compatible artifacts. You can easily authorize your DigitalOcean Kubernetes clusters so that they can pull images stored in your registry.

DigitalOcean Container Registry offers three plans: Free, Basic, and Professional, with varying levels of repositories, storage, and transfer. You can read more about DigitalOcean Container Registry in this blog post.

‘Deploy to DigitalOcean’ button and new App Platform features

Last month we released DigitalOcean App Platform, and we’re iterating quickly to address many common requests. Today we’re introducing a new button that you can embed into README.md files in public GitHub repositories. Adding the ‘Deploy to DigitalOcean’ button to your repository allows users to deploy compatible apps to DigitalOcean App Platform in just one click.

Along with this button, we’re pleased to introduce several new features:

• static `catchall_document`
• CORS policy for services and static sites
• pre and post deploy jobs
• a more robust development database
• additional pricing options

You can learn more about all of these App Platform improvements in this blog.

You can DO business on DigitalOcean

All of this innovation has fundamentally changed what you can use DigitalOcean for. While many of you initially turned to us for smaller, personal projects, you can now DO business on DigitalOcean.

In fact, many of our business customers came to DigitalOcean after first trying clouds provided by other companies that are household names. Customers usually choose DigitalOcean because they find our platform easier to use, and much more affordable.

Here’s how the founders of Scraper API, a web scraping API, and Cloudways, a popular managed hosting service, explain their decision to run on DigitalOcean.

“The pieces DigitalOcean has in place just really make sense. I need a bunch of Droplets that can scale up quickly with Kubernetes and Load Balancers. I need Redis and Postgres. I don't need the weird stuff from the other cloud providers."
- Dan Ni, Founder and CEO Scraper API

“DigitalOcean pioneered simplicity and predictability in the cloud space. Its price-performance ratio and reliability are unmatched. DigitalOcean has been a great partner.”
- Aaqib Gadit, Founder and CEO Cloudways

Join us at deploy. We’d love to chat.

We’re glad to have you along for the DigitalOcean voyage.

deploy is our first ever global virtual user conference, and we hope that you enjoy it. You can join the livestream at digitalocean.com/deploy. I’d love for you to connect with me and other members of the DigitalOcean team in our deploy channel on Discord.

As always, you can sign up for a free DigitalOcean account, or reach out for a conversation with our sales team to learn how you can use DigitalOcean in your business.