Latest products and features at DigitalOcean: November 2020

November was yet another exciting month at DigitalOcean, as we had deploy, our first 24 hour global virtual conference for developers. We announced several new products at the deploy conference, including Storage-Optimized Droplets, General Availability for DigitalOcean Container Registry, and the Deploy to DigitalOcean button. 

Here are the highlights for this month:

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Easily deploy open source apps with the new ‘Deploy to DigitalOcean’ button 

We are excited to introduce the ‘Deploy to DigitalOcean’ buttonwhich helps maintainers, contributors, and consumers of open source software save time with app deployment. You no longer have to worry about the mundane, time-consuming tasks of writing instructions for deploying your open source apps. 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. Check out the docsand deploy this sample app to see the button in action.

New features for DigitalOcean App Platform

We have made numerous enhancements to App Platform since we launched the product last month: 

• Released a jobs feature that allows you to run application code at a scheduled time
• Support for root domains that make it much easier to transfer your domain to DigitalOcean
• Support for wildcard domains so you can map any and all subdomains to your app with a single record 
• Improved build caching for all App Platform build environments. Dependencies and other data are now cached and reused between builds to improve performance.
• Added support for configuring a catch-all document that can be used by static sites to rewrite all requests to pages that are not found to the configured document 
• Added support to services and static sites for configuring an ingress CORS policy
• Added an App Platform environment variable binding with the CA certificate for managed databases in the users account

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.

• CockroachDB - The most highly evolved cloud-native, distributed SQL database on the planet
• Percona Monitoring and Management 2 - Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is a single pane of glass to help manage complex database environments in public, private, or on-premises environments
• Varnish Cache - An open source reverse HTTP proxy that can speed up a website by up to 1000%, by caching (or storing) a copy of a webpage the first time a user visits
• Yacht - A web interface for managing docker containers with an emphasis on templating to provide easy deployments
• OpenLiteSpeed Joomla - An accelerated and enormously scalable hosting platform for Joomla
• ServerWand - A magical control panel for managing websites and servers
• OpenCPU - Deploy R based APIs and web applications at scale with ease using the 1-Click OpenCPU app
• Traccar - An open source GPS tracking platform that supports a wide variety of GPS trackers
• TRASA -A Zero Trust Service Access Platform

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Introducing Storage-Optimized Droplets with NVMe SSDs

We are excited to launch Storage-Optimized Droplets! These Droplets have large amounts of NVMe SSD storage and memory, along with 100% dedicated vCPU. They are ideal for workloads that require a high number of transactions with low latency like extra large NoSQL databases (e.g. MongoDB, Elasticsearch, TimeScaleDB), monitoring software e.g. Prometheus, and other data warehouses.

You can now create Storage-Optimized Droplets in AMS3, FRA1, LON1, NYC1, and SFO3 using the control panel, API, or CLI. These are the Storage-Optimized Droplets you can choose from:

Price cut for Memory-Optimized Droplets

Just over a year ago, we introduced Memory-Optimized Droplets. We recommend these VMs for use cases such as in-memory caches and real-time big data processing. With 8GB RAM for each dedicated vCPU (along with regular SSD), Memory-Optimized Droplets give you plenty of RAM to run such memory-intensive applications. We have reduced the prices of Memory-Optimized Droplets by about 11%. Existing Memory-Optimized Droplets will be charged at the lowered price from the month of November on, reflected in the December invoice.

Ability to change the default VPC network for a region: You can now change the default VPC network for a region. A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is a private network interface for collections of DigitalOcean resources. VPC networks provide a more secure connection between resources because the network is inaccessible from the public internet and other VPC networks. With this update, when you change the default VPC network for a region, the new default network will be automatically selected during applicable resource set ups unless otherwise specified.

Base images for FreeBSD 12.2 UFS and ZFS: FreeBSD 12.2 UFS and ZFS base images are now available in the control panel and via the API. The image slug for the UFS FreeBSD image freebsd-12-x64 has been replaced with freebsd-12-x64-ufs. We will support 12.1 for three months after the release date of 12.2, which is currently scheduled for January 31, 2021. Note: As of July 2022 FreeBSD is no longer available.

Cloud native

DigitalOcean Container Registry is now in General Availability

We’re pleased to share that DigitalOcean Container Registry is now Generally Available. DigitalOcean Container Registry makes it easy to securely store and manage private container images, especially for use with DigitalOcean Kubernetes. Highlights of the release include:

• Three subscription plans that offer different allowances for repositories, storage, and bandwidth
• 1-click method to configure DigitalOcean Kubernetes Cluster to use the registry
• Garbage collection using the command line or the API
• Ability to see the current storage usage in the control panel

Firewalls for Kubernetes clusters: On Kubernetes 1.19 and later we now provision two fully-managed firewalls for each new Kubernetes cluster. One firewall manages the connection between worker nodes and master nodes, and the other manages connections between worker nodes and the public internet.

Developer experience

Doctl updates: We have released four new versions for doctl, the official DigitalOcean CLI:

• v1.49.0 - This release includes the ability to update the default VPC for a region, the ability to set an expiration time when downloading kubeconfig files, and more.
• v1.50.0 -  This release includes new doctl apps sub-commands to retrieve information about App Platform pricing plan tiers, instance sizes, and regions. The doctl registry sub-command now supports managing garbage collection for container registries.
• v1.51.0 -  This release adds support for managing DigitalOcean Container Registry subscriptions.
• v1.52.0 -  This release adds a --force-rebuild flag to doctl apps create-deployment.

DigitalOcean Terraform Provider updates: We have released the following versions of DigitalOcean Terraform Provider:

• v2.2.0 -  This release adds a new digitalocean_ssh_keys data source and a digitalocean_custom_image resource.
• v2.1.0 - DigitalOcean Container Registry is now in general availability and requires a subscription plan. As a result, the digitalocean_container_registry resource now requires setting a subscription_tier_slug which is supported with this release.

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!

John Gannon,

Principal Product Manager