Home > Blogs > Product Teardown Of Digital Ocean: How Digital Ocean Is Revolutionizing Cloud Services
Digital Ocean is a Cloud infrastructure service provider headquartered in New York with data centers prevalent throughout the world. It provides seamless Cloud services across the globe and is primarily focused on simplifying the web infrastructure for the developers. It provisions virtual servers and provide Cloud services to deploy and scale applications that run on multiple computers simultaneously.
However, today the competition is getting tough as there are many Clouds providers in the industry like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud to name a few. Each of these Cloud alternatives is popular for its unique feature in terms of flexibility, reliability, and scalability. Digital Ocean recently achieved the title of being the third largest Cloud hosting company in the world in terms of web-facing computers and it is competing with the other Cloud providers in terms of other Cloud service offerings, where it still needs to focus more in order to improve its popularity in the Cloud industry.
Services Offered by Digital Ocean
Digital Ocean is popular for its simple to use feature that attracts the majority who are just starting with the Cloud technology. It takes the complexity out of the Cloud hosting services and offers super fast on demand SSD Cloud servers with easy to use control panel console and a simple API for getting started. It provides a good user experience which is simple to set up and offers more affordable and honest pricing. Its lower price and user-friendliness feature are what makes it most popular with the star-ups and small scale organizations as they are looking for services to startup their business quickly without worrying much on the investment. Its unique selling points of business is that it allows developers with some of the prominent services to accomplish tasks like the ability to spin up the droplet faster, i.e. within a fraction of the time that it takes on the other Cloud platforms. It offers many out of box features which allow users to create, automate, deploy and manage robust scalable cloud infrastructure. Some of its offered services and features are floating IP addresses, Kubernetes in minutes, shared private networking, Tier-1 bandwidth, block storage, databases, and SSD drives.
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Evolution of The Digital Ocean Platform
Digital Ocean was founded in the year 2011 on June 24th by Ben and Moisey Uretsky. However, its formation was started long back before it officially came into existence. In 2003 the founders of Digital Ocean have formed a small company called Server Stack which was started as a managed web hosting business. After getting more insight into the Cloud market and performing a detailed study they found that there is something very strange and that there is a scope of growth for them. They observed that the big corporations have Cloud requirements on a larger scale and that majority of the web hosting companies are inclined towards these large organizations in providing and fulfilling their needs for the Cloud infrastructure services and managing their servers. They realized that none of them were really targeting startups, small scale organizations, and independent software developers. They identified them as their potential customers as this market went unnoticed by many.
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Thus, this gave birth to a new Cloud company and Digital Ocean was founded by the Uretsky brothers in 2011. Since then it became the company that provides various services like Cloud hosting and server provisioning for startups, independent software developers and many small-scale organizations and making it easy got them to get started with hosting their application on the Cloud as the time to market with minimal budget becomes critical for them.
Soon they started growing themselves and towards the mid of 2012, they had a good number of people in their team who started working in line with their vision. This strong team with their extensive work made significant progress in the market and became part of the star-ups accelerator program. As the startup accelerator program geared towards its conclusion, they started gaining more customers and delivered instances in huge numbers and became more popular in the industry.
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At the beginning of 2013, Digital Ocean became one of the first Cloud hosting companies in the world to offer SSD-based virtual machines for a seamless experience. They started fueling to the growth of the Cloud industry by helping many star-ups in developing their modern applications and deploying them in the Cloud.
Reasons to Opt for Digital Ocean
In a world where today there is great competition amongst the Cloud providers, in terms of experience and services offered we get a benefit of having to choose from a lot of options in the market. But the question arises why Digital Ocean and why not other Cloud service providers. There are a few of the reasons below:
Simple and Developer Friendly
Digital Ocean offers a simple interface and allows developers to quickly set up their instance and droplets in no time. Unlike, other Cloud hosting platforms it doesn't complicate things by the very fancy user interface and cluttering it with many advanced features, which might not be required by someone who is just starting off with the Cloud journey. Due to its friendly interface, it attracts many startups as well.
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Affordable pricing for the services offered
Its pricing model is one of the important facts that sets it apart from other similar Cloud Companies in the market. The Plan offered by Digital Ocean starts with as low as $5 a month, while the other companies offering similar services are charging more. This makes it an affordable and preferable option for many beginner business and star-ups and also proves to be a good starting point for independent developers.
Documentation, Setup Guides, and Communities
The official documentation of any product is always considered as one of the best ways to learn about any system. Digital Ocean provides good comprehensive documentation with setup guides that allow even the first time Cloud developers to work with ease. It also has an active online community that benefits everyone working on it by answering queries and providing feedback discussions.
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Reasons to Consider Other Cloud Platforms:
Although there are reasons that one can choose Digital Ocean, there are few several points where one should consider other Cloud options as well.
Compatibility with the other operating systems
Digital Ocean has a limitation that it supports only Linux based instances and servers only. On the other hand, other Cloud providers like AWS or Azure supports almost every OS platform, so if one has a requirement to work with other OS like Windows then they should consider using Amazon EC2, Google Cloud, Azure, etc.
Prior Knowledge in Server Management
As Digital Ocean is being considered as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) service, it is the user's responsibility to manage the services on their own. On the contrary, AWS and other big providers offer Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Function as a Service (FaaS) options where the user only needs to focus on their application and data, the other tasks like the server management is managed by the Cloud provider.
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Hence, many users prefer this Serverless approach in the Cloud as compared to working on the Digital Ocean platform as it might require some prior knowledge on the server and more effort. Frankly speaking, choosing between various cloud services may be hard at times as they are always some advantages one has over the other. But the final choice entirely depends on us and should be taken upon by analyzing various factors that fulfill our requirements.
Conclusion
The advent of Cloud Computing platforms like AWS, Digital Ocean and Azure, etc. has proved to be a great benefit to the organizations working on big complex systems as they don't have to worry about investing in large infrastructure upfront. It has also made the lives of the developers easier by providing support in forms of various Cloud services. There is a continuous innovation going into this field, thus it has generated possibilities and opened the door of opportunities for many professionals in the technology industry. Given the rapid progress in this area, it becomes difficult for people to equip themselves with the latest trends and the skill sets that are required to operate and manage the Cloud ecosystem. Hence it is advisable to go for good Cloud certifications to stay updated about the market. If interested, you can go for Manipal Pro Learn Cloud Certification and Online Courses. The learning path is customized, and training is equipped with hands-on labs sessions and exercises that help us familiarize with the real-life situations thereby boosting our confidence by when working live on the Cloud systems and help us become future-ready professionals.
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The advantage of Cloud certifications is that it gives us an edge over others and promotes our credibility towards the employers. One of the major hindrances for the organization today is the scarcity of talent in this area and are seeking professionals who have good exposure towards the Cloud architecture and offer them high paying roles. The demands for Cloud professionals are not going to slow down anytime soon and the path is only expected to grow due to competition in the industry by the players like Amazon, Google, and Digital Ocean. Hence, we can conclude that the Cloud has a great market and it provides ample opportunities for everyone willing to explore.
