DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean is a cloud computing vendor that offers an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform for software developers. DigitalOcean is very popular with open source developers and competes with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Compute Engine. 

To deploy DigitalOcean's Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environment, developers launch a private virtual machine (VM) instance, which DigitalOcean calls a "droplet." Developers choose the droplet's size, which geographical region and data center it will run in, and which Linux operating system it will use: Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, CoreOS or FreeBSD. Secure Shell (SSH) is also supported for secure communication. Instead of picking a Linux distribution, developers can also create droplets from existing VM images that come with pre-installed applications -- an option DigitalOcean calls "One-click Apps."

DigitalOcean offers nine droplet sizes. The smallest size starts at 512MB of RAM with 1 CPU and 20GB of solid state drive (SSD) storage, and as of this writing costs $5 a month. The largest droplet size is 64GB of RAM with 20 CPUs and 640GB of SSD storage and as of this writing costs $640 a month. Developers have the option of resizing their droplets after creating them.

Developers use the DigitalOcean manage and monitor their droplets with a control panel and an open source API. The control panel allows developers to scale and rebuild droplets based on workload changes and perform backups and redirect network traffic between droplets. A feature called Team Accounts is available to establish resource-sharing between different DigitalOcean users.

DigitalOcean was founded in 2011 by Ben Uretsky, Moisey Uretsky, Mitch Wainer, Jeff Carr and Alec Hartman. The company is based in New York City.