The Kick-Ass Cloud for Developers
Photo: Ojie Paloma
The last few years have seen the incredible growth of cloud computing. Applications and services that were developed for on-premise use have all found a new home in the cloud. As with most technology transformations, early adoption often occurs around a hobbyist developer community that then expands into more mainstream adoption and use. The cloud is no exception; as it grows it continues to empower developers to shape technology and change the world.
What started as a primitive, manual, and cumbersome infrastructure service, has evolved into a variety of cloud vendors offering vast collections of services targeted at a number of different audiences –perhaps too vast. We have Database-as-a-Service, Compute-as-a-Service, Analytics-as-a-Service, Storage-as-a-Service, as well as deployment and network environments, and everything in between. It has left the developer community with more options, functionality, and cost than it needs or wants.
It’s time for the cloud to once again focus on developers, and that is where DigitalOcean comes in.
Started by Ben Uretsky and his brother Moisey, with the additional intellectual brawn of an eclectic group of passionate developers, DigitalOcean has focused on one goal: making developers lives easier by providing a powerful, yet simple Infrastructure-as-a-Service.
The DigitalOcean service is purpose-built for the developer, offering automated web infrastructure for deploying web-based applications. The results have been eye-popping. From a standing-start in December 2012, DigitalOcean has grown from 100 web-facing computers to over 50,000 today, making it one of the fastest growing cloud computing providers in the world. It is now the ninth largest web infrastructure provider on the planet. With this round of funding, the management team intends to aggressively hire more in-house and remote software engineers to accelerate that already tremendous momentum.
DigitalOcean is also taking a page out of the open source world and is using and contributing to the most relevant open source projects. In the same way that Github or Facebook or Twitter offers open source as a service, DigitalOcean does the same. A few weeks back, I wrote a post presenting several viable models for open source deployments and DigitalOcean is a case study. We are thrilled to be working with the DigitalOcean team as they continue to build a cloud that developers love.
NOTE: Chart data from Netcraft.
-
Peter Levine is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he focuses on enterprise investing.