How four businesses scale faster with DigitalOcean Managed Kubernetes

Forrester analysts recently predicted that despite economic uncertainty, cloud-native technologies, including Kubernetes, will continue to attract investment through 2023. That’s because technologies like these allow businesses to run with leaner teams, scale faster, and ultimately make a positive impact on the bottom line.

Kubernetes, in particular, can improve resource utilization and shorten software development cycles, and because of these benefits, Kubernetes adoption is growing within small and medium tech companies. DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS) can remove some of the complexities associated with containerization and Kubernetes management, helping small businesses access technology that was previously out of reach.

Simplifying Kubernetes with managed offerings

While it’s possible for small teams to implement self-hosted Kubernetes clusters, managing them is often too resource-intensive to make sense, costing teams time and energy that could be better spent somewhere else, and requiring a level of expertise that many small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) lack. This is demonstrated by the fact that nearly 90% of Kubernetes users now utilize managed services for their Kubernetes implementation, up 20% from 2020, according to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

With DigitalOcean Kubernetes, teams don’t need to know how to build or maintain an upstream Kubernetes cluster. DOKS performs critical tasks such as monitoring, security, updates, and more, freeing up teams to focus on their applications and realize a faster time to market.

To help small teams get started with DigitalOcean Kubernetes, check out DigitalOcean’s Developer Center, which includes resources on how to get started with a range of DigitalOcean products. For recommendations on implementing Kubernetes for your small business, download our FREE guide, Kubernetes adoption journey for startups and SMBs.

Businesses growing with DigitalOcean Kubernetes

NitroPack is a website performance platform that uses DigitalOcean Kubernetes to help its application handle hundreds of requests per second and seamlessly scale up and down to meet demand. Originally, the NitroPack team was managing servers by hand. NitroPack is a small startup with a lean team and needed to free up time and resources to focus on other initiatives. Using DOKS, they now automate the delivery of over 120,000 sites with over five million pages—a drastic increase from the 15,000 sites they were servicing in 2020.

“We chose DigitalOcean Kubernetes because we like simplicity. In the beginning, we had a small team and didn’t have the resources to manage a Kubernetes cluster. We wanted to spend time developing the product instead of managing infrastructure.”—Ivailo Hristov, CTO

Framey is a social media application focused on travel that allows individuals to upload photos of their adventures while providing location information, attraction recommendations, and more. The team initially built the entire backend on a single DigitalOcean Droplet, but experienced significant performance issues with that setup. At the time, the team didn’t have anyone in-house with DevOps expertise. They didn’t want any tech debt as they scaled, so they built with DigitalOcean Kubernetes. Starting with Kubernetes can be challenging and expensive for a new business, but with this approach, they have a fully flexible event-driven system ready to scale.

“It may be unconventional, but I’d suggest to anyone that starting with a good, reliable setup in the beginning is crucial to accomplishing goals and saving time later. You don’t want to get into a situation where you have a great product but then you have to go back and fix the infrastructure. That just gets harder and harder to do. Plan for scale. It will be more expensive in the beginning but worth it in the end. We are glad we set ourselves up for success with DigitalOcean.” —Robert Preoteasa- Founder, CEO

Shoppermotion is an IoT (Internet of Things) startup that processes millions of visits and serves custom analytics for merchandising, category, and marketing teams by tracking the movements of shoppers through a retail location. In order to provide industry-leading analytics, Shoppermotion has to solve a complex set of problems with a distributed system that’s an ideal fit for DigitalOcean Kubernetes.

"We were amazed at how easy DigitalOcean is to use, and it let us spend more time focused on our product.”—Marco Doncel, CTO, Shoppermotion

Bright Data is an industry-leading web data platform that allows businesses worldwide to collect, index, and structure public web data quickly and at scale. Their application was originally built on DigitalOcean Droplets. In early 2022, the organization ran nearly 6,000 Droplets on DigitalOcean, with a small team maintaining the entire cloud network. Bright Data has periods of high utilization that coincide with working hours, then periods of lower utilization outside typical working hours and on weekends. Because of their dynamic load, they were underutilizing their Droplets —consistently using about 60% of their computing power. They needed the ability to automatically scale up to meet demand so they could efficiently utilize resources instead of reserving Droplets for periods of high traffic. In order to optimize performance, the team switched to DigitalOcean Kubernetes.

“Kubernetes works faster, works better, and we didn’t have to come up with a new system. It allows us to scale and focus on development. With DigitalOcean Kubernetes, we can grow faster and save money by fully utilizing our Droplets.” - Nir Borenshtein, COO

Try DigitalOcean Kubernetes today

If you’re interested in trying DigitalOcean’s managed Kubernetes for your applications, take DigitalOcean Kubernetes for a spin. If you have questions about migrating from another cloud provider or what your total costs will be on DigitalOcean once you start scaling, you can schedule a meeting with our team of experts who can help answer any questions you have.