Upstart enterprise opens sixth datacenter, plans for brand new UK facility and more developer tools.
Top 10 Cloud Fiascos
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Developer-friendly DigitalOcean is expanding into Asia with a brand new cloud datacenter opening in Singapore Tuesday. It should serve developers in Australia, India, Southeast Asia, and Japan, in step with founder Mitch Wainer.
DigitalOcean will fan the flames of 150 servers in a brand new Equinix facility in Singapore to get its Asia/Pacific region going. Wainer said those five racks can be only a start if DigitalOcean follows the pattern of rapidly adding more developer accounts, because it has in North America and Europe. It has an option with Equinix for more room within the same site.
At the beginning of 2013, DigitalOcean had 2,000 users and was just commencing to gain a flood of Ruby developers that might boost its server count from 100 to 7,000 by July. As of last week, it had 163,000 active accounts and was expanding on the rate of one,000 accounts an afternoon.
The rapid expansion appeared at one point to be DigitalOcean’s undoing. In March last year, some customers complained they discovered previous users’ data unwiped and still resident at the disk they’d been assigned. And, in late 2013, a Berlin hacker posted on GitHub that he could read a prior customer’s data on a DigitalOcean disk.
[Desire to learn more about how rapid expansion ends up in missteps? See 6 Cloud Upstarts To look at.]
Wainer acknowledged in an interview that DigitalOcean had made wiping the disk clean a customer’s option rather than continuing it as a default practice, and it wouldn’t have. “It affected 0.01% of consumers,” but with DigitalOcean’s expanded customer base, that’s still 1,630 or “still large amounts of them,” he said.
The complaints prompted the firm in January to resume the wiping of all customer data off a disk whenever a virtual server is destroyed. “We had made scrubbing a droplet [DigitalOcean calls its virtual servers a droplet] an option, and we wanted to make sure scrubbing occurs 100% of the time,” he said.
With that flap behind it, DigitalOcean is all over again attempting to entice developers by offering a virtual server for $5 a month, together with access to popular developer frameworks and tools. Wainer said DigitalOcean’s services are still “very bare bones” in comparison with an Amazon or a Google App Engine, but also they are what a brand new class of developers prefer: Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Word Press, RedMine project management for Ruby on Rails, Docker, the LAMP stack, open source Ghost Blog, and GitLab, an open source developer collaboration system, he said in an interview.
Servers in DigitalOcean’s Singapore facility.
(Image credit: Digital Ocean.)
The Singapore facility is DigitalOcean’s sixth. DigitalOcean currently operates two datacenters within the Big apple region, one at an Equinix facility in northern New Jersey and one in Manhattan; one in San Francisco; and two in Amsterdam. It’s attempting to find 100 system administrators, developers, and operations employees because it triples its staff from 50 this year.
DigitalOcean was an early implementer of solid-state drives, adding 1.92 TBs of storage to cloud hosts as a part of a regular set of virtual server resources. The forged-state storage is four to ten times faster than disk storage and helps speed the provisioning of a developer’s server, which materializes in lower than a minute.
The Singapore facility will give developers in Asia faster response times. In the event that they previously connected to the Amsterdam or San Francisco datacenters, they experienced about 200 milliseconds of latency with each exchange. Singapore “will drop latency to 30ms and permit large customers to expand their presence for greater distribution,” said COO Karl Alomar within the announcement.
The firm is seeking a second site by which to expand its European presence, with the united kingdom essentially the mostsome of the most likely site for one more datacenter opening this year, Wainer said.
DigitalOcean believes it is going to challenge other cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, for developer loyalties. The Singapore center is “one of the exciting announcements to come back inside the first half the year,” said CEO Ben Uretsky within the announcement. He spoke of switching to the IPv6 from IPv4 address standard and adding load balancing, object storage, a content delivery network, and one-click installs of popular developer frameworks for such languages as Node.js and Python, in addition to Ruby on Rails.
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Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek, having joined the publication in 2003. He’s the previous editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld and previous technology editor of Interactive Week. He’s a graduate of Syracuse … View Full Bio
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