Latest products and features at DigitalOcean: December 2020

December was a busy month at DigitalOcean as we introduced many new features. Here are the highlights for this month:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Introducing new DigitalOcean Load Balancers for higher-scale business applications

As more businesses have realized they could save huge sums of money by migrating their bandwidth-intensive apps to DigitalOcean, we’ve heard some say that they need more robust, scalable load balancers than the ones we provide for just $10 per month.

We are excited to introduce more scalable Load Balancer plans. Our new ‘Medium’ Load Balancer is a great fit for transaction-driven sites or services with moderate traffic, and costs just $30 per month. Our ‘Large’ Load Balancer is ideal for higher-traffic sites or API endpoints, and costs $60 per month. Users of our existing $10 per month Load Balancer will find that these are now classified as ‘Small.’ Check out the docs to learn more.

Standard Droplet plans deprecated for new users

A few months ago, we renamed Standard Droplet plans to Basic Droplet plans. Basic Droplets have shared CPU and are ideal for simple or bursty applications such as low-traffic web servers, blogs, discussion forums, CMS, small databases, dev/test servers, microservices, and repository hosting. 

We have deprecated Standard Droplet plans from the API for new users. Existing customers will retain grandfathered access to these plans. See the API changelog for a full list of deprecated plans.

End of life for CentOS 6 (Reminder)

CentOS 6 has reached its end of life. Per our image deprecation policy, you can now only deploy the CentOS 6 image via the API. We will remove CentOS 6 from the platform on January 7, 2021.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Managed Databases for Redis 6 are now available

We recently upgraded Managed Databases from Redis 5 to Redis 6. This means if you spin up a cluster for Managed Redis, you will now have access to Redis 6. You can no longer create Redis 5 clusters. 

Redis 6 provides a lot of new functionality related to security, performance, and ease of use. This includes features like access control lists (ACLs), ability to encrypt traffic over SSL, threaded I/O to boost performance, support for a new version of the RESP3 protocol, etc. We hope this upgrade will enable you to get the most out of Redis.

Starting January 6**,** your existing clusters for Managed Redis will be automatically upgraded to version 6. Redis 6 is fully backward compatible, so your applications with Redis 5 should work seamlessly with Redis 6.

Get DigitalOcean credits for use of “Deploy to DigitalOcean” button

Last month we launched the ‘Deploy to DigitalOcean’ button, which helps maintainers, contributors, and consumers of open source software save time with app deployment. Simply embed this button and associated link in the README.md files in your GitHub repositories, web pages, blogs, etc. – and let us handle the app deployment process. 

You can now get DigitalOcean credits for use of the ‘Deploy to DigitalOcean’ button. If you refer someone to DigitalOcean via the button using a valid referral code, they’ll receive credits on their account as soon as they add a valid payment method. Additionally, you’ll receive credit with DigitalOcean for the referral. The amounts that are paid out are listed 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.

• Cloud Manager: A feature-rich web UI for Kubernetes, designed from the ground-up to support all the workflows needed by developers when deploying cloud-native and microservice applications.
• Gigantum Client: An open source web application that manages portable and reproducible work in Jupyter, JupyterLab, and RStudio. 
• CSMM: A 7 days to die server manager with lots of features! Player tracking, ingame commands, economy, Discord integrations, roles, permissions and more.
• Saltcorn: Provides an easy way to build web-applications with a wide range of functionality, from customer relationship and project management to niche social networks.

Developer experience

Doctl updates

We have released two new versions for doctl, the official DigitalOcean CLI:

• v1.53.0 - This release adds support for container registry garbage collection of untagged manifests.
• v1.54.0 - This release supports user confirmation before container registry garbage collection is started.

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!

Rafael Rosa

Senior Product Manager