Category Archives: DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean simplifies IP addressing of services with new cloud building invention

CloudCloud infrastructure platform maker DigitalOcean has launched new tools for developing building large-scale applications. The tools, Floating IPs and Team Account Management, aim to speed up the process by removing common blockages reported by cloud application writers.

The Floating IPs platform aims to make it easier for developers to quickly associate an IP address with a different cloud server (AKA Droplet). The system caters for quick allocation through one of two routes, using either the system control panel or application programming interface (API). “This eliminates single points of failure and empowers developers to build production applications at any scale,” said Brooke McKim, director of product at DigitalOcean.

The company has also released Team Accounts, a system to improve support for teams of developers working together to power established applications. The system allows developers to invite multiple users to access and manage the account’s resources, such as Droplets, without having to share their own login credentials or billing information.

DigitalOcean says that since its formation, in 2012, 700,000 developers have used its cloud building system to create eight million cloud servers. The release of Floating IPs will make it a lot easier to tag servers to apps and create highly available applications, according to Moisey Uretsky, co-founder and chief product officer at DigitalOcean.

“Simplicity is difficult to achieve,” said Uretsky, “There’s a lot of benefit in taking the time to get it right and making complex technology easy to use. We wanted this networking solution to have the same qualities developers love about The Droplet: simplicity, elegance and incredible user experience.”

Development of the new products was financed by an $83 million funding round in July 2015, with funds from Series B round of financing led by Access Industries. Other investors include Andreessen Horowitz, which led the company’s $37 million Series A round last year. Container pioneer Docker hosts its applications on DigitalOcean.

Koding bags $10m to boost cloud-native IDE

Koding secured $10m in series B this week

Koding secured $10m in series B this week

Independent development environment provider Koding closed $10m in series B funding this week in a round led by Khosla Ventures.

Koding offers a platform that aims to bridge user-friendly collaboration features with a robust, device-agnostic development platform, and the service is hosted directly on AWS and DigitalOcean infrastructure.

500 Startups and existing investors Matrix Partners and RTP Ventures also participated in the funding round, which brings the total amount secured by the company since its founding to just under $30m.

As part of the most recent round, Ari Zilka, a partner at Khosla Ventures and formerly chief technology officer at big data specialist Hortonworks, will join the company’s board.

“The cloud-based development environment has dramatically shifted how software engineers write code and collaborate. The cloud provides an immersive environment that increases productivity without requiring any installation,” explained Nitin Gupta, Koding’s chief business officer in a recent blog post.

“Already, we have over a million software developers using Koding who, in aggregate, have written over a billion lines of code, spun up millions of virtual machines and consumed over eight petabytes of storage. Our recently forged partnerships with developer focused companies like DigitalOcean and Amazon Web Services (AWS) help get Koding into the hands of even more developers worldwide.”

The company said it plans to use the funding to double down on developing its Koding for Teams offering, which brings new capabilities that allow developers to more easily on-board team members and build internal development communities across heterogeneous developer organisations.

Dev-focused DigitalOcean raises $83m from Access Industries, Andreessen Horowitz

DigitalOcean raised $83m this week, which it will use to add features to its IaaS platform

DigitalOcean raised $83m this week, which it will use to add features to its IaaS platform

DigitalOcean this week announced it has raised $83m in a series B funding round the cloud provider said would help it ramp up global expansion and portfolio development.

The round was led by Access Industries with participation from seasoned tech investment firm Andreessen Horowitz.

DigitalOcean offers infrastructure as a service in a variety of Linux flavours and and aims its services primarily at developers, though the company said the latest round of funding, which brings the total amount it has secured since its founding in 2012 to $173m, will be used to aggressively expand its feature set.

“We are laser­-focused on empowering the developer community,” said Mitch Wainer, co-founder and chief marketing officer at DigitalOcean. “This capital infusion enables us to expand our world­-class engineering team so we can continue to offer the best infrastructure experience in the industry.”

Although the company is fairly young, and with just ten datacentres globally it claims to serve roughly 500,000 (individual) developers deploying cloud services on its IaaS platform, a respectable size by any measure. It also recently added another European datacentre in Frankfurt back in April, the company’s third on the continent.

But with bare bones IaaS competition getting more intense it will be interesting to see how DigitalOcean evolves; given its emphasis on developers it is possible the company’s platform could evolve into something more PaaS-like.

“We began with a vision to simplify infrastructure that will change how millions of developers build, deploy and scale web applications,” said Ben Uretsky, chief exec and co-­founder of DigitalOcean. “Our investors share our vision, and they’ll be essential partners in our continued growth.”

DigitalOcean drops into Frankfurt

DigitalOcean is among a number of US-based incumbents moving into Germany

DigitalOcean is among a number of US-based incumbents moving into Germany

In a bid to tap further into the European market DigitalOcean has expanded its presence in Germany with a new datacentre in Frankfurt.

The dev-focused cloud provider already has a presence in Amsterdam and last year partnered with Equinix to make its cloud platform available in one of the company’s London-based Tier III datacentres.

“We’re here to give our full support to developers throughout the world by offering a simple, ideal cloud solution and infrastructure experience for hosting applications,” said DigitalOcean co-founder and chief exec Ben Uretsky. “Innovative companies in Germany deserve the best tools possible in order to continue to grow and succeed.”

The company also said it wanted to appeal to local companies with strong data residency requirements, a common theme among cloud providers throwing their weight into the German market.

Germany – particularly Berlin – has a big startup scene, but putting the datacentre in Frankfurt means it can benefit from being close to a number of large fibre interconnections. Other US-based incumbents to move into Frankfurt over the past few months include IBM (which also partners with Equinix) and AWS.

The facility is DigitalOcean’s third datacentre in Europe and tenth globally.

DigitalOcean Launches Incentivized Customer Referral Program

DigitalOcean, a New York-based cloud server and hosting provider has launched a commission-based customer referral program. The plan is accessible to registered DigitalOcean customers and will compensate them with a $10 commission for each newly acquired customer that totals $10 in billing. Registered users are provided with their own unique referral code link that allows them to track the customers they’ve brought in, as well as their commission totals.

Boasting over 190,000 Linux–based cloud servers launched since inception, DigitalOcean is a TechStars startup accelerator graduate. Each SSD “Droplet” — the company  term for its cloud servers — provides disk and network performance, coupled with the capability to easily migrate and resize existing Droplets with a single click.

“We love listening to our customers and our new referral program is one way we can give back,” says Ben Uretsky, CEO of DigitalOcean. “Referrals have been a huge driver of success for DigitalOcean. We want to give back to our loyal customers by rewarding them for continuing to spread the word and help our business grow.”

Additional cloud hosting plans include options ranging from the initial 512 MB of RAM starting at $5 per month, to a maximum of capacity of96 GB of RAM and 10 TB of bandwidth transfer.

Oops! Startup DigitalOcean Forgets to Format Recycled Drives, Exposing Private Data

Wired has a cautionary tale for you to read as you consider the perils as well as the promise of could computing.

New York startup DigitalOcean says that its cloud server platform may be leaking data between its customers.

Kenneth White stumbled across several gigabytes of someone else’s data when he was noodling around on DigitalOcean’s service last week. White, who is chief of biomedical informatics with Social and Scientific Systems, found e-mail addresses, web links, website code and even strings that look like usernames and passwords — things like 1234qwe and 1234567passwd.

The problem started in mid-January, when DigitalOcean introduced a new solid state drive storage service. “The code that wipes the data — that securely deletes the data — was not being activated under the new SSD storage plans,” according to DigitalOcean CEO Ben Uretsky .

Read the details (and weep).