Build Secure Apps on DigitalOcean with VPC and a Trustworthy Foundation

Simplicity yields productivity, and that’s why many developers have brought DigitalOcean into the workplace. Thousands of startups and small businesses have already chosen to run critical applications on DigitalOcean.

Still, many more businesses tell us that they’d gladly migrate to our cloud if we could help them better secure their applications, and if we could provide them transparency into our own security and privacy practices.

It’s with these businesses in mind that we’re pleased to introduce DigitalOcean Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and our new Trust Platform.

If you’re not already using DigitalOcean at work, and have ever wished you could, now is the time to give us another look.

VPC is the next evolution of Private Networking

DigitalOcean has, for a while now, allowed you to run resources you create – Droplets VMs, Kubernetes clusters, Managed Databases, Load Balancers – within a private network. Once enabled, Private Networking creates a second network interface that is only accessible by resources within the private network.

DigitalOcean VPC is the natural progression of our existing Private Networking feature. These are the principal improvements between VPC and our previous functionality:

• VPC allows you to create multiple private networks for your account or your team, instead of having just one private network.
• DigitalOcean can auto-generate your private network’s IP address range, or you can specify your own.
• You can now configure Droplets to behave as Internet gateways.

Each private network that you create is logically isolated from other private networks, and from the public Internet.

Secure networking made simple

We’ve worked hard to make using VPC as simple as possible.

If you’ve previously enabled Private Networking for your resources, you don’t need to do anything new to take advantage of VPC. Your account’s previous private network has now been converted into a ‘default’ VPC; no action required.

But if you’re interested in creating multiple private networks for your account or team, know that it’s easy as can be. Simply navigate to the ‘VPC’ tab within the ‘Networking’ section of your dashboard, and follow a few quick steps.

When should you use VPC to create multiple private networks?

In general, we recommend that you use VPC to create multiple private networks whenever you’re running resources that don’t need to communicate with each other.

For example, suppose you’re an agency that develops web applications on behalf of numerous clients. Now, with VPC, you can set up different private networks for each client, so that each client has its own private space with strong network isolation from other clients.

As an individual developer or business, you can run resources for unrelated applications in different private networks. Then, if you make a mistake with a resource powering one of your apps, your other apps and their underlying resources are not at risk.

VPCs are free. And bandwidth might as well be.

Many businesses with network-intensive applications such as video streaming and VPN services choose to run on DigitalOcean due to our industry-leading approach to bandwidth pricing.

Data transfer within private networks is completely free, and you can create as many VPC private networks as you want, no strings attached.

Each Droplet that you create comes with an outbound data transfer quota, and together, all your Droplets form your account’s bandwidth pool. Any excess outbound transfer is billed at just $.01/GB, a rate much lower than other clouds. Check out this blog to see how these pennies can really add up.

To estimate transfer costs for your workload, try our new bandwidth pricing calculator.

A trustworthy foundation makes DigitalOcean the simple and smart choice

The importance of security cannot be overstated. We recommend using VPC, Cloud Firewalls, SSH keys, and two-factor authentication to protect your systems from intrusion.

Many businesses demand these features, and also want to understand how we secure our infrastructure and protect customer data. Today, we’re pleased to direct you to our new Trust Platform. This website provides you one place to get all of your security and privacy questions answered, and download our available security certifications.

Get started with DigitalOcean and VPC today

We’ve talked with many developers and businesses over the years who have told us how much they wanted VPC. To learn more about VPC and our network infrastructure, please join me for a webinar a few weeks from now.

To developers who have waited for DigitalOcean to deliver VPC, we encourage you to sign up for a free account. Business users who would benefit from guidance regarding VPC and other DigitalOcean products should contact our sales team.

Happy coding!
Rafael Rosa
Senior Product Manager, Networking