DigitalOcean Reduces Complexity For Developers To Build Great Software - Faster!
DigitalOcean, the second largest hosting company in the world, is a cloud infrastructure provider focused on simplifying web infrastructure for software developers.
DigitalOcean set-up a datacenter in India last summer. Headquartered in New York City, DigitalOcean has catered to the developer community by offering on-demand cloud computing resources that can be deployed in seconds at a very flexible price point.
Prabhakar Jayakumar, Country Manager, DigitalOcean, speaks about the innovations and initiatives DigitalOcean is driving in India. Excerpts:
BW: Why is India the fastest growing market for DigitalOcean?
Prabhakar Jayakumar: 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.
Today, 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. Our growth is a validation of the simplicity and value proposition our platform offers to the developer community.
BW: Why do most developers and start-ups prefer DigitalOcean, every single time?
Prabhakar Jayakumar: The requirements of developers and startups are the same universally - they care about a cloud platform that’s simple, performant, feature-rich and easy on the pocket and DigitalOcean fulfils these requirements.
We are focused on doing the heavy-lifting on the infrastructure side, letting developers channelize their energies on building applications that solve real customer problems.
BW: Who are some of your customers in India and why do they use DigitalOcean?
Prabhakar Jayakumar: DigitalOcean has the most engaged and active user community in the industry. With nearly a million customers, we have more than 2.5 million unique visitors per month and a large repository of tutorials focused heavily on open source. We have over 50,000 teams running applications for their businesses across our 12 data centers throughout the world.
In India, we are proud to have amazing companies such as NoBroker.in, Betaout, KartRocket, and HackerRank among our customers today.
Speaking about their experience on DigitalOcean, Akhil Gupta (co-founder and CTO, NoBroker.in, says: “NoBroker was one of the first customers of DigitalOcean in India. Since Day 1, we have been amazed with the simplicity of the solution.
"DigitalOcean has grown in last three years and launched some amazing products like Block Storage, Load Balancers, and a Monitoring Service. Many times, we have been stuck for implementation, and DigitalOcean's technical blogs have come to our rescue with step to step installation guide.”
BW: What are the key differentiators and competitive strategy for India?
Prabhakar Jayakumar: We have always focused on keeping our products simple and intuitive to adopt. While the other cloud providers have focused their energy on large enterprises and legacy companies, we have remained dedicated to creating better tools for developers who want to run and scale applications in the cloud.
Apart from providing a simple, yet performing cloud platform, we offer pay-as-you-go pricing, which is simple and transparent. We have also focused on building a true community of developers to help foster the industry and support them as they build the products of the future.
Our community site provides extensive tutorials and guides for developers learning to work with Linux and developers seeking to create complex setups within their infrastructure. Along with this, we offer 24X7 support to all of our customers free of charge.
BW: How has this evolved over the year of operations?
Prabhakar Jayakumar: When we started operations in 2011, our platform appealed to the individual developer and hobbyist who used our platform for their freelancing or hosting needs. As our platform evolved, teams of developers started using DO for their business needs.
With additions such as Block Storage, Load Balancers and Monitoring and a host of new offerings in our upcoming roadmap, our goal is to enable engineering teams to better address their large-scale production environment needs.
BW: What are the innovations and initiatives DigitalOcean is driving here in India?
Prabhakar Jayakumar: As a company, we are focused on collaborating and contributing to developer communities around the world. In the same spirit, we have driven several activities ranging from workshops, hackathons, coding contests, webinars and conferences to engage with the developer community in India.
Our meet-up chapters are operational across six cities in India, and the local developer communities use this forum to share best practices and learn from subject matter experts on a wide array of technical topics, including, but not limited to, Cloud and Devops.
Our signature Tide conference has become a platform for developers and startups to connect, network, and engage with influencers, mentors, and VCs in the tech ecosystem.
To engage with students, outside of the student-only hackathons and programming contests we also organized a “Product-a-thon” contest named Campus Shark. This contest was targeted at university students and was focused on identifying and recognizing the best student engineers across colleges in India. The contest saw enthusiastic participation from student teams across colleges in more than 30 cities.
In October last year, we organized Hacktoberfest, which is a yearly initiative produced in partnership with GitHub, aiming to generate excitement around contributing to open source.
BW: How are strategic partnerships in India helping grow the India business?
Prabhakar Jayakumar: Hatch is DigitalOcean's global incubator program designed to support 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 forged 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, VCs such as Accel, SAIF Partners and government-run initiatives such as the Startup India program).
Our goal is to empower developers and software companies around the world to build amazing things, and our robust, affordable, and simple infrastructure is making the cloud more accessible than ever. India is poised to unleash a tremendous amount of innovation in the next decade and we want to be there to support every business to grow and succeed.
