Young, developer-oriented service increases Amsterdam footprint, preps new datacenter in Singapore.
DigitalOcean, among the fastest growing cloud services, is opening a brand new datacenter in Amsterdam with private networking and IPv6 service. This can add a Singapore site by the top of January.
The service has also created a one-click image of a well-liked open-source Docker server that developers can activate.
The new flagship facility will initially encompass a modest 500 servers, but can have the choice to expand to ten,000 servers. CEO Ben Uretsky said DigitalOcean might be watching its rate of expansion in Europe and be capable to move to at least one,000 servers on the end of the 1st quarter. As an indication of where it thinks its European footprint is headed, DigitalOcean purchased 100,000 IP addresses for the hot facility. It’s equipped with Juniper routers to hold traffic on private lines from the datacenter to numerous destinations.
At the beginning of the year, DigitalOcean had facilities in New Jersey, California, and Amsterdam. Its original 1,000-server capacity in Amsterdam is anticipated to double in 2014 with the addition of more servers to the hot facility, Uretsky said in an interview.
It moved its East Coast datacenter from N.J. to Ny city in August, cohosting with Telx on the communications hub at 111 Eighth Ave. DigitalOcean plans to open its first Asian datacenter, in Singapore, by the top of January, Uretsky said.
[Desire to learn why DigitalOcean is in expansion mode? See Digital Ocean: Developer-Friendly Cloud Service On the cheap.]
Digital Ocean is an early implementer of solid-state disks in its datacenters, putting 1,920 GB/s of SSDs on a number server. The high-speed storage allows a DigitalOcean customer to login and activate a virtual server within 55 seconds, the company’s website claims.
It also competes with low prices, although its basic server is a microtype that Amazon Web Services has eliminated from its lineup. The same old-issue, get-started server for developers has a virtual CPU resembling a single core of a 2-GHz Xeon processor with a modest 512 MB of RAM and 20 GB of SSD storage.
DigitalOcean charges 0.7 cents an hour — 2.1 cents for 3 hours — for this kind of server. If an ordinary month has 720 hours in it, that bill involves $5.04, but DigitalOcean rounds it off at $5 a month if developers use a monthly billing system.
There’s no exact equivalent inside the Amazon catalogue of instances, but its m1 small server comes with one virtual CPU reminiscent of a Xeon core of older vintage than DigitalOcean’s, 1.7 GB of memory, and 160 GB of disk storage. The sort of server is offered at 6 cents an hour, with Reserved Instances or Spot instances of an analogous size available at lower prices.
Uretsky said his firm “has no hidden fees,” and the $5 monthly covers use of network data transfers at no additional charge.
“We’re attempting to make developers’ lives easier and make allowance them to jot down code faster,” said Uretsky. A part of that effort was making a on hand Docker server, which acts like a shipper’s standardized freight container in moving software around.
A developer can use Docker to contain his application, application server, database connections, and web server, after which move the assembly right into a different environment where it really works through Docker’s standard interfaces. “It creates a far simpler approach to move things around,” said Uretsky.
Digital Ocean got off to a quick start earlier this year after leaders of the Ruby on Rails community discovered and moved onto it, including putting Rails documentation on its servers. Netcraft reported that DigitalOcean, after a year’s operation, on the end of 2012 ranked 568th among service providers. By mid-2013, its customer base swelled, its server count grew from 100 to 7,000, and it moved as much as number 72 among service providers, Netcraft said. Only Amazon and Chinese search engine Alibaba expanded faster during that period.
Ryan Bates’s screencast service for Ruby on Rails users, RailsCast.com, moved onto DigitalOcean, bringing an enormous following of Ruby developers. Digital Ocean is making an attempt to create a good environment for PHP, Node.js, and other developers by borrowing a concept pioneered by Heroku and providing build packs for developers. A buildpack is a bunch of scripts that assemble source code with the appropriate safeguards and within the right sequence for compiling and doing initial test runs.
The crucible of cloud, big data and distributed computing is hell on systems. Will application performance management quiet down complexity — or simply add fuel to the hearth? Also inside the new, all-digital APM Under Fire special issue of InformationWeek: Cloud industry heavyweights discuss the professionals and cons of OpenStack support for Amazon APIs. (Free registration required.)
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