April was another busy month where we focused on building new capabilities to help you achieve better performance, scalability, and efficiency for your apps. Here’s a snapshot of some of the key updates.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Premium AMD Droplets are now available in six additional regions 

Earlier this year, we introduced Premium Droplets to support growing needs of businesses and offer faster performance and flexibility to choose underlying hardware for their workloads. We’re thrilled to announce that Premium AMD Droplets are now available in NYC1, SGP1, AMS3, BLR1, LON1 and TOR1. With this release, we now support both Premium Intel and AMD Droplets in all our regions.

Resizing between regular and premium Intel Droplets re-enabled in NYC3 and SGP1

You can resize DigitalOcean Droplets to increase or decrease server resources. Resizing options between regular and Premium Intel Droplets are now available in NYC3 and SGP1.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Managed Databases now support Droplets with dedicated vCPUs

We are excited to announce that DigitalOcean Managed Databases now support General Purpose Droplets, Storage-Optimized Droplets, and Memory-Optimized Droplets. Unlike the Basic Droplets, all these Droplet types offer 100% dedicated vCPUs and are ideal for mission critical workloads. The table below lists the various Droplet types supported by each database engine.

Read this blog to learn more about the use case scenarios. Check out this short video showing how easy it is to spin up database clusters with the new Droplet types.

We’ve been expanding support for this feature in additional regions. See all the currently supported regions here.

Marketplace updates

We launched many preconfigured 1-Click Apps in the DigitalOcean Marketplace to help you save time and remove the hassle of provisioning servers.

• filecoin-lotus - Filecoin is a distributed storage protocol. The lotus daemon provided in this image is a Filecoin implementation. 
• Web-WordPress - Web-WordPress is the open-source edition of WordPress. The 1-Click App automatically installs WordPress and any dependencies.
• QloApps - An open-source software that launches a multilingual hotel booking website within a matter of a few minutes that too for free.
• CloudCasa - A simple, scalable, and inexpensive cloud backup service for Kubernetes and cloud databases.
• OpenLiteSpeed Rails - Automatically installs Linux, performance web server OpenLiteSpeed, Ruby, Rails, rbenv, and CertBot.
• ThePlanMinder PostgreSQL - PostgreSQL 12 server with a script to quickly create a database for The PlanMinder. With afw firewall and fail2ban configured and ready to use.
• Invoice Ninja - The #1 open-source platform to create and email invoices, track payments and expenses, and time billable tasks & projects for clients.
• twigs - A compact Linux distribution that helps you discover your cloud, container, source code, and many other types of assets.
  

Cloud Native

New capabilities for Kubernetes clusters

We introduced following new capabilities for Kubernetes clusters:

• Use surge upgrade when upgrading an existing cluster. Surge upgrade is enabled by default when you create a new cluster.
• Move a Kubernetes cluster and its associated resources, such as Droplets, load balancers and block storage volumes, to a project using the DigitalOcean control panel or doctl command-line tool. You can also assign a project when you create a new cluster. If you do not specify a project, it gets assigned to the default project.
• Delete resources, such as load balancers and block storage volumes, associated with a Kubernetes cluster using the DigitalOcean control panel, API or the doctl command-line tool.
  

Developer experience  

Introducing DigitalOcean OpenAPI Specification  

We’re excited to announce the release of a new tool to give you confidence when developing against our API: the DigitalOcean OpenAPI Specification. The OpenAPI Specification (OAS) defines a standard, language-agnostic interface to RESTful APIs which allows both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of the service without access to source code, documentation, or through network traffic inspection.  

New website for technical documentation 

We’re thrilled to announce the recent launch of our new website for technical docs -  docs.digitalocean.com! This new unified site serves as a consolidated platform for all technical resources such as product documentation, API information and support/knowledge base articles. It's built on DigitalOcean App Platform and a great example of a scalable site running on our platform. Stay tuned for a detailed blog on all enhancements we made with our docs pages!

Updates to DigitalOcean Command Line Interface (CLI) 

We have released a new version for doctl, the official DigitalOcean CLI:

• v1.58.0 - This release adds a --wait flag to the apps create-deployment command which blocks until the deployment is complete. By default, the registry kubernetes-manifest now generates a manifest that applies the secret to all the namespaces in the Kubernetes cluster using the DOSecret operator.

Updates to DigitalOcean Terraform Provider

v2.6.0 This release enables surge upgrades for Kubernetes clusters by default and adds a digitalocean_firewall data source.

v2.7.0 This release adds support for Kubernetes node pool taints and resizing load balancers. 

You can check out the release notes to get up to date information about product updates, and read about updates from the previous month here. 

We hope you’ll give the new products and updates a try. If you have an idea for improving our products or want to vote on other user ideas so they get prioritized, please submit your feedback. And if you have any questions, please feel free to ask them here. 

Until next month, 

Happy coding! 

Pragya Pandey

Sr. Product Marketing Manager