Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - An update from DigitalOcean

Cloud computing is changing at pace. Small businesses are demanding more - and companies like DigitalOcean say they are stepping up to deliver.

Gabe Monroy, chief product officer at DigitalOcean, joined Timber IT Jams to shed light on how the company is innovating to better serve startups, developers and growing businesses. "For those who are unaware of DigitalOcean, we're the cloud for builders - builders are developers and small businesses who are building digital products," he said.

Whereas the world's largest providers focus on enterprise-scale offerings, DigitalOcean carves out a different niche. "Hyperscalers often focus on large enterprise companies. At DigitalOcean, we're really focused on smaller teams and businesses who are looking to build and scale applications," Monroy explained.

The company offers a range of products spanning compute, storage, networking and databases. "For example, we have managed Kubernetes, object storage, serverless functions and lots more in that vein," Monroy said. Acquisitions have also played a role in expanding DigitalOcean's reach. "Just a few months ago we acquired a company called Cloudways, adding managed hosting for companies who want a simple and zero-maintenance way for running WordPress or things like WooCommerce in the cloud," he added.

Beyond the core tech, DigitalOcean claims to excel where lean teams need it most: help and documentation. "We take special pride in our documentation and our support which truly cater to the needs of small teams and small businesses," Monroy said.

Recent Innovation

DigitalOcean has recently sharpened its focus in the Asia-Pacific region, launching a new data centre in Sydney. "Just recently, in fact about two weeks ago, it's connected to our backbone network, it's got 400 gigabits per second of connectivity, low latency links to California and Singapore, as well as great domestic connectivity inside the Australia and New Zealand area," he shared.

Improvements are also happening under the bonnet. "We have new performance enhancements to our storage products... our volumes storage has been updated to provide a 50 percent increase of IOPS and throughput. For our object storage product, DigitalOcean Spaces, we've doubled the requests per second to 500 reads per second and 300 writes per second," Monroy said.

On the Kubernetes front, the company now offers a "highly available control plane" for additional resiliency. Monroy revealed, "Kubernetes on DigitalOcean is growing at 70 percent year over year. It's extremely popular, and customers want to have a resilient and highly available control plane to support that so it's something we've added recently."

Another area of growth is serverless computing. "We've also added serverless functions... DigitalOcean functions are fast, scalable. They're a great way to run code blocks that run in response to event-based triggers. You can create functions for a variety of purposes, serverless APIs for your web and mobile apps being the most popular," said Monroy.

Market Trends and Challenges

But it is not just about the technology. Monroy pointed to the broader shifts in the industry. "The global population of developers is estimated to reach 71 million in 2030. That's an increase of 44 million developers from where we're at today," he noted. At the same time, industry forecasts predict a shortage of four million developers in 2025.

To counter this, Monroy believes the cloud must become easier to use. "To counter this developer shortage, builders need products that are easier to use and allow them to do more with less," he said. Small businesses and start-ups, he argued, are "uniquely positioned to influence the world, share their ideas, innovations, build new digital products."

Monroy, who previously worked as a VP at Microsoft Azure, reflected on the gap. "What they often find is that the needs of small businesses aren't priority at those big cloud providers... those products, they're built for enterprises so they tend to be complex, with lots of features that cater to large IT departments versus the small product teams that we serve," he explained.

DigitalOcean positions itself as the antidote to this complexity. "Pricing at the big clouds is also pretty confusing with really complex metering so your bill looks like the utility bill for a housing complex versus something you can internalise and understand," Monroy said. "The prices also themselves tend to be more expensive than the equivalent products at DigitalOcean - that's true across compute, bandwidth and storage. We're just cheaper."

He argued that simplicity is the company's defining trait. "The biggest differentiator at DigitalOcean is simplicity. Simplicity is core to our values and it's apparent in everything we do. It shines in our products, which are the easiest to use that I would argue in the cloud industry, and also our pricing, which is generally cheaper than the hyperscalers but also predictable so you know exactly what your bill is going to be at the end of the month," he said.

Expansion in Asia-Pacific

The new Sydney data centre marks a major expansion in the company's regional presence. "We've got a large and engaged customer base in Australia and New Zealand for a long time now but we've never had dedicated infrastructure in that part of the world so the latency is not optimal, right? But that's all changed with the launch of our Sydney data centre," Monroy said.

The new infrastructure is not just about local customers, either. "That's true for folks who are in that region looking to serve that region, but also to DigitalOcean's global customer base who's increasingly looking to serve the Sydney and Australia and New Zealand markets overall. Not to mention, you know, markets in the broader Pacific region," Monroy added. 

Monroy himself visited Sydney to mark the centre's launch. "I was actually just in Sydney two weeks ago to do the ribbon cutting for this data centre, celebrate the launch, and I personally enjoyed meeting the startup community there," he said.

He highlighted customers making use of DigitalOcean's regional footprint, including companies providing blockchain infrastructure, data transfer solutions, and low-code platforms that turn designs into apps.

Looking Ahead

As the interview closed, Monroy encouraged users to tap into the company's resources. "I would recommend checking out our tutorials at the DigitalOcean community site, that'll be a great way to help understand how to get up and running... You can also check us out on Twitter," he said.

With cloud demand rising, Monroy left on an optimistic note about serving the next generation of builders. "Thanks for having me," he said.