DO India’s Q4 Update: Conferences, Webinars, and More

A lot has happened since our last update from DO India. India continues to be DigitalOcean’s fastest growing international market, and we’re always thinking about the best ways to serve the needs of the local developer community.

In this post, we’ll share the latest happenings from DO India, including:

• A recap of the latest edition of Tide, our user conference in India;
• A preview of the Campus Champ contest for student developers and entrepreneurs in Indian universities, and;
• Information about a free webinar series on containers and orchestration (open to everyone around the world).

The Rising Tide

In early October, we hosted the third edition of our user conference, Tide, in Mumbai. With over 250 in attendance, participants got the opportunity to learn best practices for managing and scaling applications in the cloud via hands-on workshops, attend talks by startup founders, and build new connections with people from the local ecosystem, including fellow developers, entrepreneurs, mentors, and VCs.

Scenes from October’s Tide Conference in Mumbai.

The conference saw more than 20 influencers speaking on a diverse set of topics relevant to developer and startup communities, including:

• “The manual for Indian startups” where Vijay Kumar Ivaturi (ex-CTO of Wipro and Co-founder and CTO of Crayon Data) shared interesting insights about the startup ecosystem and a candid take on his experience authoring a book with the same title.
• “Technology decisions for building a scalable business” where CTOs from high growth startups—Devendra Rane (CoverFox), Suresh Kondamudi (CleverTap), Priyadarshi Lahiri (Edge Networks) and Ankit Tomar (Bizongo)—shared their experiences, challenges, and frameworks for choosing the tech stack at their businesses.
• An inspiring talk by Ajeet Khurana (Mentor and Angel Investor) on “what Indian entrepreneurs really need today”.

Head over to our YouTube channel to watch video recordings of these and other interesting talks and panel discussions.

Bringing Out the Best in Student Developers

Campus Champ is a contest that aims to identify and recognize the best student developers and entrepreneurs across Indian universities by providing them a platform to showcase their product design and development capabilities. We were enthused by the participation and by the product ideas that came about in our inaugural edition of the contest organized in 2016.

This year’s edition of the contest is currently underway, and students are being tasked with building something useful and relevant to the community around them. The contest will run in two phases, with Phase 1 (ending on November 11th) requiring students to provide a brief write-up of the product idea and its potential utility and impact on the community. Phase 2 (running between November 16th and December 22nd) will involve the shortlisted student teams building on their idea and converting it into a working prototype. Outside of the experience, students get a chance to win attractive cash prizes and swag from DigitalOcean!

We are excited to see the innovative projects that students will build in the current edition of the contest. If you are a student from India who wants to participate, sign up now for Campus Champ (registration closes Friday, November 10th).

Learning More About Containers

If you’re interested in learning more about containers and container orchestration, we’re hosting a free, 6-part webinar series led by cloud expert MSV Janakiram on Deploying and Managing Containerized Workloads in the Cloud. It will cover the essentials of containers including container lifecycle management, deploying multi-container applications, and scaling workloads. The series will also cover Kubernetes and highlight the architecture, deployment, and best practices of running stateful applications.

This webinar series would be beneficial for developers of all skill levels interested in designing, developing, and deploying microservices and containerized applications. You can sign up for the webinars here and feel free to spread the word amongst friends or colleagues who may find these sessions useful.

As always, if you have any feedback or suggestions on how you would like to engage with DigitalOcean, let us know in the comments below. Happy holidays!

Prabhakar Jayakumar (PJ) is Country Director (India) responsible for running DigitalOcean’s operations in India. His team is focused on building out the DO community and supporting the localized needs of India’s developer and startup ecosystem.