Introducing Bring Your Own Container Image workflow for DigitalOcean App Platform

A few months ago, we launched DigitalOcean App Platform, our modern, reimagined PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering. App Platform makes it very easy to build, deploy, and scale apps and static sites. It’s a fully managed solution, meaning we handle provisioning and managing infrastructure, operating systems, databases, application runtimes, and other dependencies, so that you can focus on your code. 

One of the biggest benefits of App Platform is that it runs on DigitalOcean Kubernetes. When you run an app, we build and deploy containers for each of your app’s components like web service, database, or workers on Kubernetes clusters.

App Platform supports many popular languages and frameworks out of the box, including Node.js, Python, Django, Go, PHP, Laravel, React, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Gatsby, Hugo etc. If you have apps in other languages, you could still deploy them using the App Platform, but need to provide the appropriate Dockerfile in your source repo.

We are excited to introduce the ‘Bring Your Own Container Image’ (BYOCI) feature that allows you to deploy pre-built container images with App Platform. This means that if your app is already containerized, you can deploy it using App Platform, irrespective of how it’s built. This further reduces the barrier of entry and opens up App Platform for a vast number of use cases, including tighter integration with CI/CD systems.

Currently App Platform integrates with DigitalOcean Container Registry (DOCR), so to deploy your container images with App Platform, you first need to push them to the DOCR. DOCR recently became Generally Available, and makes it easy to securely store and manage private container images. It also provides a Starter plan that’s free and is ideal for trying DOCR and testing out the BYOCI workflow for App Platform. Check out the docs for more details.

We hope you’ll check out App Platform. To learn more, read the docs, try out this sample app for an RSS feed aggregator (here are the repos for the frontend and API), and let us know what you think!

If you’d like to have a conversation about using DigitalOcean and App Platform in your business, please feel free to contact our sales team.

Happy coding!

Jake Levirne,

Senior Director of Product Management