Tutorial

Navigator's Guide: DigitalOcean, Customer Success, and You

Navigator's Guide: DigitalOcean, Customer Success, and You

Note: This is an early release version of the contents of the Navigator’s Guide book, an offering from the DigitalOcean Solutions Engineers. The goal of the book is to help business customers plan their infrastructure needs, provide working examples along the way, and include technical nuance and the “why” that makes some decisions better than others.

The book and accompanying code will be publicly available in a GitHub repository. Because this is an early release, the book is not yet complete and the repository is not yet public, but stay tuned!

In the introduction, we said that this book would give you the tools and the understanding you need to run a successful infrastructure on DigitalOcean — but what is DigitalOcean, and who are we to tell you what to do?

What Is DigitalOcean?

DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider. Our mission from the start has been to provide an infrastructure experience that development teams love with the features your business needs.

We were founded in 2012, and today we have over 400 employees working out of our headquarters in New York City, our satellite offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Bangalore, India, and remotely across the world.

Because our cloud computing platform was built with simplicity at the forefront, managing infrastructure on DO is easy whether your business is running one virtual machine or ten thousand. Here are some of the products we offer:

  • Droplets are more than just virtual machines. They are a scalable compute platform with free additional features, like Cloud Firewalls, Monitoring, Reserved IP Addresses, and DNS zone hosting, that allow you to easily run production applications.
  • Kubernetes is DigitalOcean’s native support for the most popular orchestration tool for containerized applications. We’ll cover containers and Kubernetes more in other books and resources.
  • Load Balancers automatically distribute incoming traffic across your Droplets, enabling you to build more reliable and performant applications by creating redundancy.
  • Volumes are additional SSD-based block storage devices you can add to your Droplet to suit your database, file storage, application, service, mobile, and backup needs.
  • Spaces is scalable and simple object storage to store, serve, backup, and archive any amount of web content, images, media, and static files for your web applications.

We move fast: we completed all of these features and product launches in the first six years of the company’s history, and our product roadmap promises constant iteration and further expansion of features.

You can find detailed information on our products and current pricing on digitalocean.com, and we’ll keep this book updated in the future as we expand and improve our product offerings.

Who Are We?

We, the authors, are Fabian Barajas and Jon Schwenn. We’re both Solutions Engineers on the Customer Success team at DigitalOcean.

Fabian Barajas joined DigitalOcean in 2015 as a Customer Success Engineer and became a Solutions Engineer in early 2017. He is an LPIC-1 and SUSE Certified Linux Administrator, and holds a number of certifications, including ComTIA Linux+ and A+.

Jon Schwenn has worked in multiple teams at DigitalOcean since 2015. His prior accomplishments include founding a specialty colocation service that hosted thousands of Mac servers, creating and administering a fairly large automotive internet forum, and building an e-commerece system from scratch with ColdFusion in 2001. It was different times back then. Jon is a Red Hat Certified Architect and has been using Linux professionally since 2003.

As a business customer, the Customer Success team is your dedicated resource for help with any platform-related issues. We can solve your problems, answer your questions, or connect you with other people at DigitalOcean who work directly on Product or Engineering.

Our whole team is here to support you: Customer Success Managers are your point of contact for strategic planning and any account concerns, and Customer Success Engineers provide 24x7x365 support through our support system and aim to respond to technical issues within 20 minutes.

We, the Solutions Engineers, help with strategic technical planning discussions, create code examples, and write proof of concept documentation. And sometimes write books.

Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.

Learn more about us


Tutorial Series: The Navigator's Guide to DigitalOcean

This is an early release version of the contents of the Navigator’s Guide book, an offering from the DigitalOcean Solutions Engineers. The goal of the book is to help business customers plan their infrastructure needs, provide working examples along the way, and include technical nuance and the “why” that makes some decisions better than others.

About the authors


Default avatar

staff technical writer

hi! i write do.co/docs now, but i used to be the senior tech editor publishing tutorials here in the community.


Still looking for an answer?

Ask a questionSearch for more help

Was this helpful?
 
Leave a comment


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Join the Tech Talk
Success! Thank you! Please check your email for further details.

Please complete your information!

Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

Become a contributor

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more
DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel