A Cloud Platform To Put An End To The Gap Between Platform Providers And Developers: DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean provides a cloud platform to deploy, manage, and scale applications of any size, removing infrastructure friction and providing predictability so developers and their teams can spend more time building better software.

DigitalOcean has 12 data centers across the globe including one in Bangalore, India and its infrastructure is used by teams and companies building innovative, next generation businesses on the cloud, across multiple industries, including e-commerce, adtech, healthcare and financial services. With an active community of 3.5 million developers, DigitalOcean claims to have one of the largest libraries of open source resources available in the world.

BW CIOWORLD: How does DigitalOcean empower developers and software companies?

DigitalOcean is closing the massive gap between platform providers and the 30 million developers who want freedom from infrastructure headaches so they can focus on writing code. When DigitalOcean was launched in 2012, other cloud providers were neglecting the software developer. Prices were too high, the offerings were too complex to navigate, and the UI was unnecessarily complex. DigitalOcean creates simple and elegant solutions for software developers deploying and scaling their applications in the cloud at the best price-to-performance value. From inception through the entire product development process, we are obsessed with the user experience, which includes everything from the UI / UX to having a transparent pricing model.

BW CIOWORLD: What does DigitalOcean do to support startups?

DigitalOcean has a global incubator program called Hatch which is designed to help startups as they launch and scale. This includes access to DigitalOcean's cloud for 12 months, free technical training, mentorship, priority support, and an opportunity to connect with other startups, accelerators, and investors. As part of Hatch, we have formed partnerships with key players in the ecosystem to support startups in their portfolios including top-tier accelerators such as NUMA, incubators such as Nasscom 10K startups, Venture Capital firms such as Accel, SAIF Partners and government-run initiatives such as the Startup India program.

BW CIOWORLD: What offerings does DigitalOcean brings to India?

Droplet, our nickname for cloud servers, is DigitalOcean’s core product. It offers software developers high-performant Linux Servers at market-leading prices, with a hyper-focus on simplicity and user experience. It comes with compute-heavy resources, bandwidth, and memory with the option to add resources like storage on demand as needed.

Spaces (an object storage product of DigitalOcean), Block Storage, Firewalls, Load Balancer, and a Monitoring service are among our other offerings. Our Kubernetes offering has been opened up for early access and provides developers a simple way to deploy and manage their container workloads in the cloud. We also offer an identical pricing plan across all of our regions worldwide across our product offerings.

BW CIOWORLD: What is DigitalOcean’s strategy in removing complexity from customer’s cloud migration journey in India?

DigitalOcean gives developers better software and tools to launch and scale any application in the cloud.   By offering the simplest platform, the most transparent pricing, and an elegant user interface, we reduce complexity so developers can build great software – faster. We also have Developer Advocates and Customer Success Engineers who work with our customers to understand their systems and help them with their migration to the cloud.  

BW CIOWORLD: What is the importance of cloud services platforms in digital disruption?

India is home to the fastest growing ecosystem of startups and entrepreneurs. With the number of software developers throughout India expected to grow to over 5 million over the next couple of years, India is poised to become the largest developer market in the world.

Cloud enables developers and entrepreneurs to quickly build, test and deploy their innovative applications and products. The faster build-test-deploy lifecycles mean that they can more easily iterate their idea or concept before building a full-fledged product and eventually scale their business and build long term sustainable companies.

BW CIOWORLD: How do you ensure of providing a secure platform to your customers?

Privacy and data security are of paramount importance to any business, and trust and security are integral components of DigitalOcean’s offering. As a cloud infrastructure provider, we are constantly ensuring that our infrastructure is compliant with local laws, making it easier for our customers to be compliant as well.

We have a lot of systems that we have purchased and built to defend our environments, but the most important are foundational controls like two-factor authentication, jump hosting, and patch management. Protecting systems requires a consistent and long-term focus on doing the fundamentals correctly.  

BW CIOWORLD: What is the expansion outlook of cloud hosting?

Companies have already understood the benefits that cloud computing accrues to their business. Besides the economic benefit related to reduction in total cost of operations (TCO), cloud computing also offers flexibility in supporting fluctuating workloads since organisations can rapidly scale up or ramp down based on requirements. The high level of scalability offered by cloud platforms allows companies to seamlessly adapt to clients’ unique business needs without continuously upgrading information infrastructure. It also enables businesses to achieve agility in a constantly evolving market scenario.

For most CIOs, the decision to transition to the cloud is no longer an “if they should?” but rather “when they should?” Also, most CIOs don’t necessarily take a big-bang approach of moving all their existing applications to the cloud at one go, instead plan for a phased roll-out. Businesses have also started adopting a “multi-cloud” approach, not only to leverage the strengths and features of the underlying cloud platforms but also as a de-risking strategy to avoid vendor lock-ins and over-dependence on a single cloud platform.