Introducing Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets

Whether it’s crystal clear audio, glitch-free video, or uninterrupted gaming, everyone loves seamless digital experiences. For startups and small and medium businesses (SMBs) the ability to deliver high-quality media and data to users is as important as computing itself. That’s why we’re introducing DigitalOcean Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets, virtual machines built for high throughput and consistent performance, ideal for network and computing-intensive workloads such as streaming media, online gaming, machine learning, and data analytics.

Get to know Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets

The following capabilities are included in Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets out of the box:

• Up to 10 Gbps* of outbound data transfer: For bandwidth-intensive use-cases, such as streaming and gaming, the benefits of high performance hardware can be maximized only when the processed data is transferred to the endpoint quickly. With five times higher outbound network speeds when compared to their Regular variant, the new Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets make delivering high-quality digital experiences easier than ever.

• Consistent and robust performance from latest generation hardware: Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets utilize some of the latest generations of Intel® Xeon® CPUs, providing consistently high application performance. Based on our internal benchmark tests*, Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets deliver up to a 58% increase in single-core performance and a 20% increase in multi-core performance.

• Super fast NVMe storage: NVMe solid-state drives (SSD) use parallelism to deliver faster disk performance than with regular SSDs. Workloads that require a large number of transactions will have much lower latency with NVMe SSDs. File reads via Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets are up to 65% faster and file writes are up to 290% faster*, when compared to Regular CPU-Optimized Droplets.

• Dedicated CPU: A dedicated CPU Droplet has guaranteed access to the full hyperthread at all times, delivering a consistently high level of performance. This is unlike a shared CPU Droplet, that may get a fraction of CPU cycles when other Droplets sharing the CPU experience a high load.

Why deploy Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets?

Here’s why you should consider adopting Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets:

• Enhance user experience. Leverage higher outbound data speeds in Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets to provide a faster and smoother app experience.

• Scale your operations seamlessly. The mix of newer CPUs, faster network speeds, and NVMe SSDs makes it easy to scale your apps for data-intensive workloads, especially machine learning and AI applications. Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets are a great choice to train and develop powerful data analysis models for your business and customers.

• Maximize the performance consistency of your apps. When running multiple Droplets to power your app, Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets deliver powerful performance across all Droplets, enabling you to provide consistently superior experiences to your users.

DigitalOcean customers, such as Validin who tried out the new Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets, love the performance advantage they bring to their applications.

“We just switched several CPU-intensive data pipelines to DigitalOcean’s Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets from another major cloud provider. This move cut hours per day of processing time out of those pipelines. The combination of raw CPU power, CPU count, and local NVMe disk (with the 2x option) is perfect for us. We’re thrilled that these will be generally available soon for our other data processing workloads.” - Kenneth Kinion, Managing Director, Validin

Faster Droplets, same simplicity

Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets further our mission to provide a simple and easy-to-use cloud experience for builders and businesses. With today’s launch, when you go to the control panel to spin up Droplets, you’ll see a new option for Premium Intel within our CPU-Optimized plan. You can also find slugs for Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets for use with our CLI, API, or extensions like our Terraform provider.

When paired with our high-performance object and block storage solutions, Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets can help you tackle data-intensive applications with ease. Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets are also available as worker nodes in DigitalOcean Kubernetes.

Spin up Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets today!

Premium CPU- Optimized Droplets are now available in NYC1, NYC3, SFO3, FRA1, AMS3, BLR1 and SYD1 datacenters, with more coming soon. Read about DigitalOcean Droplet pricing for your business.

Spin up a Premium CPU-Optimized Droplet now or switch from Regular to Premium. If you’d like to have a conversation about using DigitalOcean in your business, contact our sales team.

*The benchmark CPU, network and file I/O performance numbers are based on DigitalOcean’s internal testing framework and parameters, using an 8 vCPU Droplet. Actual performance numbers may vary depending on a variety of factors such as system configuration, operating environment, and type of workloads.