New in DigitalOcean App Platform: Enhanced security, insights and DBaaS integration

Businesses are increasingly looking for ways to bring their apps to market faster. DigitalOcean App Platform addresses that need by providing a fully managed solution that helps you build, deploy and scale your apps quickly. You can deploy apps by simply pointing to your GitHub or GitLab repo, and App Platform will do the heavy lifting of managing the infrastructure, app runtimes and other dependencies. We’re thrilled to share that we’ve added several new features and capabilities to App Platform to make it even easier for you to manage your apps.

Securely connect your apps to Managed Databases as Trusted Sources

Whether you’re a developer, an entrepreneur, or a small business, securing your apps and data is top priority for everyone. By building a secure connection between your apps and databases, you can greatly decrease the likelihood of a security breach, brute force password attempts, and denial-of-service attacks from any server not explicitly permitted to connect to your database. 

We’re excited to announce that you can now securely connect your apps built on App Platform to DigitalOcean Managed Databases as trusted sources. Adding your app as a trusted source creates a secure connection to the database which accepts traffic only from the app and denies other private and public connections, making your database more secure. Similarly, if your existing managed database has trusted sources enabled, the app is automatically added as a trusted source. This feature is available for Redis, MySQL and PostgreSQL Managed Databases and will be added for Managed MongoDB soon. Connecting to a database during the build phase is not supported in App Platform, and so this limitation also applies to trusted sources.

Here’s a quick video that shows how you can add your app as a trusted source for a Managed Database.

Gain better visibility into your apps with alerts and monitoring

When you’re building and maintaining apps, notifications about the status of your app can help you mitigate issues quickly. Clear visibility into the status and health of your apps also helps you become more productive, as you no longer need to mine logs to understand why your app is not working as expected. We’re excited to announce that we’ve added alerting and monitoring capabilities to App Platform so that you can get notified about the status of your apps and address issues quickly. DigitalOcean’s default alert policies will notify you about the deployment and domain configuration of your apps, as shown in the image below. 

Default Alert Policies

You can receive notifications via email or Slack. You can also add new alert policies that will be triggered based on the conditions you set.

Creating new Alert Policies

Here’s a quick walkthrough of configuring alerts and receiving notifications.

Integration of App Platform with Managed MongoDB

In June, we launched DigitalOcean Managed MongoDB – a fully managed database as a service for modern apps. App Platform seamlessly integrates with Managed MongoDB, allowing you to choose Managed MongoDB as the backend for your app. You can either spin up a Managed MongoDB cluster when you’re creating your app using App Platform, or connect MongoDB to an app that you may have previously created. Here’s a great video that shows how you can use Managed MongoDB with App Platforms apps.

More flexibility for deploying your apps with support for monorepos

A monorepo is a single repository that stores code for many different projects. Developers often use monorepos to re-use code, manage dependencies, optimize builds, and efficiently collaborate across teams. We’re excited to announce that App Platform now supports deployment of different apps that are all in a single git repository (a monorepo). Each of these apps may be in a separate directory in the repo. This helps reduce the time it takes to develop and deploy apps, further making developers more efficient and productive. Watch this video to see this capability in action.

Integration of App Platform with Stackbit

Stackbit is a platform that allows you to collaborate on Jamstack sites, enabling your team to edit them visually instead of dealing with Markdown, git, or writing any code. You can take advantage of the benefits of the Jamstack, including better performance, tighter security, lower cost, and greater scalability, along with the convenience of inline visual editing. You can now easily publish your sites built on Stackbit to App Platform and take advantage of the fully managed platform. 

We hope that you are excited about this release and will give App Platform and Managed Databases a try. Check out the docs and this session from our deploy conference for more information. 

We also invite you to a DigitalOcean Tech Talk where we’ll be discussing and showing these updates in action.

If you’d like to have a conversation about using DigitalOcean App Platform and Managed Databases in your business, please contact our sales team.

Happy coding!

Moises Eskinazi

Senior Product Manager