Nimbella Joins the DigitalOcean Family

I’m excited to share that this morning we announced that we have acquired Nimbella, a serverless platform provider. The addition of Nimbella’s serverless capabilities will complement the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings from DigitalOcean. This will ultimately provide more choice to application builders while maintaining the simplicity of product experience and price predictability that DigitalOcean is known for.

The rise of serverless

Serverless computing is a popular trend in cloud application development and promises a lot of benefits to developers and teams building software. Some of these benefits are freedom from server management, virtually infinite instant scale, and paying only for what you use. However, adopting serverless technologies can come at a price—it can be harder to adapt existing applications to serverless architecture, current serverless platforms support primarily stateless workloads, and the pricing models are hard to understand and can surprise you with unexpected bills.

Why Nimbella?

Nimbella has built a differentiated platform from the ground up that not only addresses the above problems but also provides a modern open-standards-based serverless implementation that builds on Kubernetes while hiding all of its complexity. Nimbella addresses the needs of event-based applications, long-running applications, stateful workloads, and more complex use cases that use artificial intelligence and machine learning. This makes serverless computing more accessible to developers and small businesses building applications. As a result, Nimbella has been named a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: Function-As-A-Service Platforms, Q1 2021.

Nimbella’s founding team, Anshu Agarwal, Rodric Rabbah, and Eric Swildens, have deep product and technical expertise in building and operating large-scale distributed systems. Rodric is also one of the co-creators and the lead technical contributor to Apache OpenWhisk, an advanced and production-ready open source based serverless computing platform. This dedication to open source and alignment on simplicity is why we’re excited to welcome Nimbella’s team and technology to the DigitalOcean community. 

What’s next

As we work to integrate Nimbella into the DigitalOcean platform, we will continue to support existing Nimbella users with bug fixes and security updates to the existing Nimbella platform. New users will be able to access these serverless capabilities on DigitalOcean once we launch our integrated offering, anticipated to be generally available in the first half of 2022. If you’d like to keep up with the developments, please signup here.

Please join me in welcoming Nimbella to the DigitalOcean family. I’m excited to offer this advanced capability to our customers in the coming months and we look forward to continuing to simplify cloud computing so developers and businesses can spend more time creating software that changes the world.