INFO Technology RadarINFO Technology Radar

DigitalOcean

Hold

DigitalOcean is a cloud computing platform that offers developers and businesses a straightforward way to deploy, manage, and scale applications of any size. Known for its simplicity and developer-friendly interfaces, DigitalOcean provides a range of services including virtual servers (Droplets), managed databases, and object storage.

Previous Benefits of DigitalOcean

  • Simplicity and Ease of Use: Offered an intuitive user experience with straightforward setup processes, making it accessible for small teams and startups.
  • Cost-Effective Solutions: Provided affordable pricing models suitable for projects with limited budgets.
  • Developer Tools: Included features like one-click apps and pre-configured environments, accelerating development and deployment workflows.

Reasons for Holding

  • Standardizing Cloud Offerings: To streamline our cloud infrastructure, we are focusing on mainstream providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud that offer more comprehensive services and better integration capabilities.
  • Competitive Alternatives: Platforms like Vercel and Render provide similar simplicity with additional features tailored for modern application deployment.
  • Lack of Distinct Advantages: DigitalOcean does not offer significant benefits over competitors that would justify its continued adoption within our technology stack.

Current Stance at INFO

While DigitalOcean has been valuable for simplifying cloud deployments, we are placing it on hold to concentrate on standardizing our cloud offerings with providers that align better with our long-term strategic goals. We believe this focus will help us maintain consistency, improve scalability, and leverage the extensive feature sets of major cloud platforms. Existing projects on DigitalOcean will be maintained, but future deployments will prioritize platforms that offer more concrete benefits compared to competitors.

Assess

We are assessing DigitalOcean as general PaaS provider. It is the PaaS market leader and provides a wide range of generic PaaS functionalities.

We believe for solutions where the complexity of AWS is not warranted a PaaS provider can offer a cheaper and more flexible alternative over a traditional cloud provider such as AWS.

In the same space we are also trialing Vercel and assessing Render.