When Lukas Klein co-founded Datacake in 2015, the idea was simple: make IoT easier. “Back then,” Lukas recalls, “it was called IoT already, but it wasn’t really clear what IoT meant.” Working with German industrial companies, Lukas and his team observed a pattern—many clients faced similar data connectivity issues. That’s when they decided to build something that would help to solve that problem, something scalable: a low-code IoT platform that abstracts away complexity and empowers users to connect devices, collect data, and build dashboards without needing deep technical expertise.

Lukas added, “We also provide a one-stop shop solution where you can get hardware recommendations, sensors that we have tested, for example, a gateway directly from us that’s connected to our cloud. You just plug it into Power, set up your sensors, and you have custom-made dashboards that already solve your use case.” In addition to this, Lukas reassured that “you can always customize the application to your specific needs.”

Switching To DigitalOcean

“When we started with our MVP, we hosted it on Heroku,” Lukas says. “It was perfect at the time for the speed of deployment because we did not have to set up anything at all. We could literally just push our code there, which you can do nowadays with the DigitalOcean app platform as well.”

But, growing pains emerged as Datacake looked to scale up operations. “It quickly became too expensive and limiting. We needed a system that would grow with us without forcing us into massive infrastructure costs.”

The Datacake team then spent time exploring other options with intention. “We also looked at the other players like AWS and GCP. They’re super powerful, but also very complex. With DigitalOcean, you literally don’t have to study anything to get started. You don’t have to spend weeks setting up policies and all this. So this was the main driver.”

Familiarity with the platform was also present. As someone who had used DigitalOcean for their own personal projects, at previous companies, and as an early beta tester for DigitalOcean’s Managed Kubernetes, Lukas found it perfectly matched Datacake’s needs.

“I think I was one of the first beta testers, and it was perfect timing because what we loved from Heroku was that we could bundle our application into these Docker images. Kubernetes allowed us to do the same thing at a different scale.”

Scaling IoT with DigitalOcean

Today, Datacake processes around 35 million messages per day, connecting low-power sensors and industrial devices across the globe. Despite that impressive scale, the company runs lean—with just ten employees, only three of them are engineers.

That efficiency is possible, Lukas says, because of DigitalOcean’s managed and easy-to-use infrastructure.

Datacake’s platform runs primarily on:

• Managed Kubernetes (DOKS): powering their core application
• Managed PostgreSQL: serving as their primary database
• Managed Caching for Valkey: acting as both a cache and a real-time message broker
• Droplets: spun up automatically via API for custom workloads

Running managed services through DigitalOcean has enabled Datacake to scale affordably. “By using managed services, we don’t need to hire a team of DevOps engineers,” says Lukas. “That easily saves us the cost of several full-time salaries.”

Beyond performance, Lukas highlights the human element as a major reason Datacake continues to choose DigitalOcean. “One thing I totally love about DigitalOcean is the people,” he says. “I’m still in contact with our first CSM. Everyone I’ve spoken to has been super nice, and it’s always easy to reach a human. You don’t get that with other hyperscalers.”

Looking Ahead: Scaling IoT Globally

As Datacake continues to grow, its mission remains clear: to make IoT accessible for businesses of all sizes.

“Our vision is to become the go-to IoT platform by making IoT as simple as possible,” Lukas says. “DigitalOcean fits perfectly because it allows us to scale efficiently, keeps infrastructure costs predictable, and gives us global reach through multiple data centers.”

With DigitalOcean as their infrastructure partner, Datacake can focus entirely on innovation and customer value—not on managing servers.

“We can put 100% of our focus on building the application and serving our customers,” Lukas concludes. “That’s a huge benefit to our business.”