Introducing General Purpose Droplets: Dedicated vCPUs and More Memory

In our 2019 product roadmap update, we highlighted our push up-stack into an Application Marketplace, a managed Kubernetes service, and multiple Managed Database offerings. We’re complementing these products by investing in expanding our Droplet infrastructure offerings to help you build and deploy amazing apps.

We received positive feedback from users when we launched our CPU-Optimized Droplets. At the same time, we heard from users that they wanted the same performance and predictability of dedicated CPU resources, but with higher configurations of RAM. Today, we’re pleased to announce General Purpose Droplets (in Limited Availability) to fill that need.

What Are General Purpose Droplets?

General Purpose Droplets are optimized to deliver a well-proportioned balance of memory, dedicated CPU, and SSD storage resources. They’re ideal for a variety of application workloads ranging from web apps and databases to larger applications that have higher memory requirements and still demand predictable CPU performance. Some of the use cases for these Droplets are:

• Web application hosting
• Relational and NoSQL databases
• In-memory caches
• E-commerce sites and analytics applications
• Various enterprise business applications

General Purpose Droplets are backed by Intel’s highly performant Xeon Platinum 8168 processors with a clock speed of 2.7GHz and are available in six different configurations ranging from 2 vCPU / 8 GB RAM to 40 vCPU / 160 GB RAM (plan details below). This translates into a 1:4 ratio of dedicated vCPU to memory for most of these plan configurations, which is an ideal ratio of compute to memory requirements for most general-purpose, mainstream applications. Additionally, these plans come with the same highly performant attached SSD storage that our users love on all of our Droplets.

Performance Class of Droplets Are Production-Grade

Together, General Purpose Droplets and CPU-Optimized Droplets form our Performance Class of Droplets - virtual machines that offer dedicated hyper-threads from best-in-class Intel processors in a variety of configurations.

How do Performance Class Droplets compare to Standard Droplets? Our original Droplet plans, used by millions of developers around the world, offer a variety of shared-CPU configurations that are ideal for running workloads that can handle variable levels of CPU performance and can spike CPU usage as needed. Typical use cases include small web servers, blogs, and dev/test environments.

Plans, Pricing and Availability

General Purpose Droplets are available in the following configurations:

General Purpose Droplets are currently available under Limited Availability, and can be provisioned in two data centers – New York (NYC1) and Frankfurt (FRA1). Over the next few weeks we have expansion plans to make these Droplets available in additional data centers globally, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, we hope you head over to the Create Droplet page and take these new Droplets for a swim, eh, spin.

Happy coding,

Karan Chhina

Senior Product Manager, Compute