DigitalOceanA quick overview and review
Written by Hendrik. Aug 18, 2022
4
2 min read
Not Your Typical Cloud Provider
DigitalOcean has been around as a company since 2011. However, in a market of cloud providers dominated by big companies such as Amazon with AWS and Microsoft with Azure, DigitalOcean has had to find its own niche within this crowded space. Instead of focusing on covering every possible use-case a company might have, they focus on a few specific things and do so very well.
Table of Contents
Why Not Just Use AWS?
AWS has a very clear goal. With their offer of over 200 services they try to be able to solve every single possible use-case that any type of company may have. They cover the whole spectrum. In contrast, DigitalOcean only offers 11 services, and tries to do so exceptionally well. DigitalOcean has a different USP compared to the likes of AWS and Azure.
DigitalOcean's USP
DigitalOcean focuses on three things in order to offer its USP:
- Developer-friendliness: Everything is quick, easy, and straight-forward to setup. You can get a VM or function up and running within seconds.
- Price: Compared to AWS, DigitalOcean offers lower prices and no hidden costs or charges.
- High-Performance: Per dollar payed, you get more performance within your VMs than with AWS.
DigitalOcean is marketed towards small development teams and small projects that want to build fast and be flexible enough to scale up later down the line.
What's Missing?
While trying out DigitalOcean, a few things services or features aren't offered, which would've been nice to have.
- Missing service for user management and access management. Something similar to AWS Cognito would be valuable, but isn't offered at the time of writing this post.
- Not much room for configuration. Being developer-friendly means that the configuration is very minimal and straight forward. However, this means that there aren't many possibilities for configuration.
- Application logging and monitoring is very very minimal. Compared to logging and monitoring with AWS CloudWatch, DigitalOcean offers almost nothing comparable.
- VMs kann only be created with Linux distributions, which can be a disadvantage, depending on the use-case.
Conclusion
DigitalOcean wants to excell in its own niche. They focus on creating a valuable offer for small development teams and small projects. It fulfills these requirements well enough to be a viable option for smaller projects. The advantage of DigitalOcean is its developer-friendliness, transparent and cheap pricing, and high-performance ressources.
Thanks for reading my post. I’d love to get feedback from you, so feel free to shoot me a tweet!
- Hendrik
