Latest products and features at DigitalOcean: October 2020

October was an exciting month at DigitalOcean as we launched our new, reimagined PaaS offering - DigitalOcean App Platform. Here are the highlights for this month:

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

DigitalOcean App Platform is now in General Availability (GA)

We are excited to announce that DigitalOcean App Platform is now in General Availability. App Platform is a modern PaaS (platform as a service) offering that makes it even easier to build, deploy, and scale your apps. You can deploy code by simply pointing to a GitHub repository and App Platform will do all the heavy lifting of managing the infrastructure, app runtimes, and dependencies.

We have made a made a few enhancements since the product launch:

• Added two new pricing plans under the Basic and Professional tiers to provide more flexibility in selecting container sizes.
• Increased the memory of the Development Database from 256 MB to 512 MB, with no change in price.

We hope you will try App Platform and use it to deploy your web apps, websites, and APIs. Check out the docs, learning resources, and sample app for an RSS feed aggregator (here are the repos for the frontend and API) to get started.

Marketplace updates

We launched several new preconfigured 1-Click Apps in the DigitalOcean Marketplace to help you save time and remove the hassle of provisioning servers.

• ServerWand: A magical control panel for managing websites and servers. Host multiple sites on a single server, manage apps, firewall, databases, backups, system users, cron jobs, SSL, and email with an intuitive interface.
• BigBlueButton Server: A free software web conferencing system that features a whiteboard that suits lectures and training sessions.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

New Droplets are placed into a VPC network: All droplets created after October 1, 2020 are placed into a VPC network by default. A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is a private network interface for collections of DigitalOcean resources. VPC networks provide a more secure connection between resources because the network is inaccessible from the public internet and other VPC networks. With this new update, you can no longer manually enable VPC networking on existing droplets, but can migrate existing droplets into VPC networks using Snapshots.

Creation of new Spaces in FRA1 has resumed: We have updated capacity in FRA1 and have resumed the creation of Spaces in that region. Note, the creation of new Spaces in SGP1 is  temporarily disabled until 2021 while we update capacity in this region. Existing Spaces in SGP1 will be unaffected, and you can still create new Spaces in AMS3, NYC3, SFO2, and FRA1.

End of life for Fedora 30 (reminder): Fedora 30 has reached its end of life. Per our image deprecation policy, you can only deploy the Fedora 30 image via the API. We will remove the Fedora 30 image from the platform on October 8, 2020.

Cloud native

Apply taints to Kubernetes node pools: You can now apply taints to Kubernetes node pools using the DigitalOcean API. When you configure taints for a node pool, the taint automatically applies to all current nodes and any subsequently created nodes in the pool. For more information, see Kubernetes’ documentation on taints and tolerations.

Developer experience

Doctl updates: We have released two new versions for doctl, the official DigitalOcean CLI:

• v1.47.0 -  This release adds support for setting Kubernetes node pool taints.
• v1.48.0 -  This release promotes doctl apps commands with support for DigitalOcean App Platform to General Availability.

DigitalOcean Terraform Provider update: v1.23.0 of the DigitalOcean Terraform Provider is now available. This release introduces a new digitalocean_app resource with support for DigitalOcean App Platform.

You can check out the release notes to get up to date information about product updates, and read about updates from the previous month here.

We hope you’ll give the new products and updates a try. If you have an idea for improving our products or want to vote on other user ideas so they get prioritized, please submit your feedback. And if you have any questions, please feel free to ask them here.

Until next month,

Happy coding!

Jake Levirne,

Senior Director of Product Management