Latest products and features at DigitalOcean: May 2020 

May was a busy month at DigitalOcean, with a brand new data center and updates to many of our products. Here are the highlights:

• SFO3 - A new data center in San Francisco: We introduced SFO3, a brand new data center in San Francisco, a city which since 1849, has been the destination of many diggers of gold, first physical and now virtual. 

SFO3 expands our presence in North America with a modern data center, and brings our global data center count to 13, allowing you to easily serve customers across the world. Within SFO3 you can run products such as our Droplet VMs and Kubernetes, and our new VPC to set up multiple private networks for your applications, with each network isolated from the others. Check out this short video to get a glimpse of what’s inside a modern cloud data center.

• Reserved IPs billing update - Reserved IPs (formerly named Floating IPs) are publicly-accessible static IP addresses that you can assign to Droplets. Reserved IPs are always free when assigned to a Droplet, but we have now started charging for unassigned Reserved IPs. The first charge will appear on July 2020 invoices for all Reserved IPs that were not assigned to Droplets during the month of June. If you have unassigned Reserved IPs that you don’t need, you can delete them to avoid any charges. 

• New version for DigitalOcean Terraform provider: Version (1.18.0) of the DigitalOcean Terraform provider is now available. This release includes support for the backend keep alive option for the load balancer resource and data source.

• Root password for Droplets: Users can create a root password to access their Droplet on the ‘Create Droplet’ page, instead of emailing a one-time password after creation.

• Marketplace updates: You can now search for Marketplace apps directly from the ‘Create Droplet’ page making it a lot easier to discover the apps that suit your workflows. We also launched several new preconfigured 1-Click Apps in the Marketplace to help you save time and remove the hassle of provisioning servers.

  ISPmanager Lite- Like cPanel and Plesk, this webserver manager provides a rich feature set for managing websites, creating users, handling domains, emails, databases, etc., and supports an unlimited number of users and domains.
  Supabase PostgreSQL- Unmodified Postgres with some useful plugins and provides some of the most common extensions with a one-click install!
  UH VPN- A secure, fast, and easy to use VPN platform designed for individuals, groups of friends or companies.
  Workarea- An enterprise-grade commerce platform written in Ruby on Rails.
  Vitess- A database solution for deploying, scaling, and managing large clusters of open-source database instances. It currently supports MySQL and MariaDB.
  MeiliSearch- A powerful, fast, open-source, easy to use and deploy search engine.
  Live Chat Helper- A stable Live Support Chat solution for everyone who wants to have the application hosted on their infrastructure. 
  Folding@Home- Helping with the COVID-19 pandemic effort, a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, including the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins implicated in a variety of diseases. 
  Fiype- A complete DevOps and IT Ops platform. It enables you to monitor websites, web apps, APIs, servers, and more and gives you detailed metrics of things that might be wrong with your infrastructure.
  Mozilla’s Hubs Cloud Personal- Create private, collaborative immersive rooms that can be accessed on your desktop, mobile phone, or VR headset.

  You might also want to check out Jitsi Server, an open source app for video conferencing and chat. This app is gaining a lot of popularity as work from home has become the new normal due to COVID-19.

Check out the release notes for other minor product updates in May. You can learn about the updates from the previous month here. 

We hope you give the new SFO3 data center a try by running a few workloads. If you have an idea on how to improve 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 and stay safe!

Rafael Rosa,

Senior Product Manager