Latest products and features at DigitalOcean: February 2021

February was a busy month at DigitalOcean as we introduced Premium Droplets, plus updates to many other products. Here are the highlights for this month:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Introducing Premium Droplets with faster Intel and AMD CPUs and NVMe SSD

We are excited to introduce Premium Droplets with faster Intel and AMD CPUs, along with NVMe SSD. Premium Droplets are guaranteed to utilize some of the newest CPUs we have in our fleet.

• Intel Premium Droplets currently run second generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, which feature what’s commonly referred to as the Cascade Lake architecture. These Intel CPUs operate at a base frequency of 2.50 GHz and max turbo frequency of 3.90 GHz.
• AMD Premium Droplets currently run second generation EPYC processors, which feature what’s commonly referred to as the Rome architecture. These AMD CPUs operate at a base frequency of 2.0 GHz and a max turbo frequency of 3.35 GHz.

In contrast, our Regular Intel Droplets feature a mix of first generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and older Intel Xeon processors. Check out this short video to see how easy it is to spin up Premium Droplets.

Spaces are now available in SFO3

Spaces are now available in SFO3, meaning you can now create new Spaces in that region. Note that the creation of new Spaces in SGP1 is temporarily disabled while we update capacity in this region. Existing Spaces in SGP1 will be unaffected, and you can create new Spaces in regions like AMS3, NYC3, SFO3, and FRA1.

Creation of new resources in SFO2 is disabled for new customers

Due to capacity limits in the region, we have disabled the creation of new resources in SFO2 for new customers. Existing customers with resources in SFO2 are unaffected and can still create and destroy resources in SFO2.

Reminder - End of life for FreeBSD 12.1

FreeBSD 12.1 has reached its end of life. Per our image deprecation policy, you can now only deploy the FreeBSD UFS and ZFS image via the API. We will remove the images from the platform on 11 March 2021. Note: As of July 2022, FreeBSD is no longer available.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

App Platform now available in BLR, SGP, and SFO regions

We are excited to announce the availability of DigitalOcean App Platform in BLR (Bangalore, India), SGP (Singapore), and SFO (San Francisco, CA) regions. This enables you to deploy code closer to your customers. In addition to this, App Platform is also available in AMS (Amsterdam, Netherlands), FRA (Frankfurt, Germany), and NYC (New York, NY) regions.

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.

• Budibase - Enables you to build internal tools, such as; dashboards, admin panels, CRMs, approval apps, employee wikis, and everything in between!
• WebMaker Server - A scalable hosted environment for publishing WebMaker applications created using the WebMaker Design Studio.
• OpenBoxes - Supply chain management system. 
• Kubernetes 1.19 - Provides the necessary tools to initialize or join CAST AI managed multi-cloud Kubernetes cluster.
• NetBox - An open source IP address management (IPAM) and data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tool developed specifically to address the needs of network and infrastructure engineers.
• Decentralized Internet - An SDK and library for building decentralized web and distributed computing projects.
• ThePlanMinder PostgreSQL - PostgreSQL 12 server with a script to quickly create a database for The PlanMinder.
• WebDNA Server - A scripting language application that connects with web servers for the purpose of adding dynamic and database-driven qualities to websites.

Developer experience

Updates to DigitalOcean CLI 

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

• v1.55.0 - This release adds Docker Hub and GitLab support to App Platform’s create and update commands.
• v1.56.0 - This release includes support for database firewalls management, Kubernetes cascading deletes, and installing Kubernetes 1-Clicks to existing clusters.

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!

Shantanu Kedar

Senior Manager, Product Marketing