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This sucks. I really want DO to succeed because I love their offerings - whereas I occasionally feel like I really do need to RTFM in depth for many AWS offerin

This sucks. I really want DO to succeed because I love their offerings - whereas I occasionally feel like I really do need to RTFM in depth for many AWS offerings (even EC2), DO seemed to just work. That being said, and I can’t put my finger on why necessarily, it sometimes feels a bit like Heroku - the thing you use before you “graduate” to just using one of the major cloud providers.

spectramax 7y ago
They're not shutting down or winding down. I am guessing that they hired a lot of people to start building an AWS competitor which is a steep battle (even with funding) and goes against the grain of DO philosophy - keep things simple and target DO for small-medium businesses (sub-100 employees). Investors went into DO thinking of a AWS/GCP/Azure unicorn, but after 6 years it appears to be a small rainbow pony than an almighty unicorn. This restructuring appears to be a realization of what happened with that vision and how it panned out, I may be wrong though. I personally love DO, I don't want to deal with AWS complexity for basic needs. Minimalism and simplicity certainly has value.
gist 7y ago
> I really do need to RTFM in depth for many AWS offerings Agree. But I think part of the plan with Amazon et al is that those who RTFM are locked in to the platform and therefore will be less likely to switch.
kbar13 7y ago
past a certain point you want your provider to do more and more for you (more features). like you mentioned, AWS is complex but they do pretty much everything for you. I've built systems that are just glued together AWS services.
- wgerard 7y ago
  totally, and people who know the ecosystem well are extremely productive at getting things up and running. Definitely a skill floor/ceiling thing going on.
- toast0 7y ago
  My experience is the opposite, for less critical systems, it's fine for the provider to do everything; as things get more critical, I want more control. At that point, all I need from the hosting provider is a server that stays up with a network that stays up. And contacts to skip bullshit triage when the network is broken and their monitoring doesn't show it.
gazelle21 7y ago
Its funny you mention that, I had the same thought comparing it to Heroku, can't quite put my finger on it why that is.
whitepoplar 7y ago
Perhaps because they don't heavily advertise large anchor customers? Sure, there are a bunch of brands on the front page, but that doesn't tell you whether they run 100% on DO or if they maybe used DO once for a side project. Digital Ocean needs a "Netflix", or at least more publicity around how their existing whales use their offerings.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
avree 7y ago
It's funny—my experience is pretty much opposite. At a certain scale AWS will provide really world-class support beyond just troubleshooting. DO forwards you to (granted, fairly in-depth) documentation an expects you to read it and engineer your own solutions.
- wgerard 7y ago
  totally. I mentioned this in another comment but it feels like a skill floor/ceiling thing to me. AWS/etc heavily reward you for investing time/money/etc but can be a bit more difficult to get started with without investing resources immediately, whereas DO is very easy to get up and running on but can be difficult when you encounter anything more complex.
- bberenberg 7y ago
  Are you over $500/month spend with DO? They offer a different tier of support at that point which has been solid in my experience.
- iudqnolq 7y ago
  As an on-and-off DO customer learning how to use Linux I find the documentation they've creates (payed ICs to create, I think) extremely useful and consistently of decent quality. When I see them in a Google search for an issue I'm always excited.
djsumdog 7y ago
Digital Ocean is pretty similar to Vultr: they offer a straight easy API for starting up VMs and managing DNS (I've written a tool that uses both of their API[1]; been meaning to do a post on the differences). It's kinda nice because you're just putting up VMs and there's not the type of vendor lockin you get with AWS/Azure/Google. That being said, DO is obviously trying to compete on that scale now. It has managed databases to compete with RDS, load balancers, and even managed k8s. They want to be a real AWS alternative, but when you start building around these components, you get locked in. If they're laying off people, it could adversely affect startups thinking of building around their services. And for people who think "Well I can just use another terraform provider" .. it really is not that simple at all. AWS/Azure/Google/DO are all very different. They have vastly different terraform providers/modules and you're pretty much writing an entirely new setup per each provider because of they way they handle firewalls, security, IPs, inbound-outbound, etc. The OpenStack API or any type of real standard has yet to emerge that branches all these offering. If you want "cloud" hosting (and most do because managing your own Postgres/MySQL clusters with backups and failover is a fucking bitch; especially if you're just starting out and want to get going fast), you need to realize you might need to be locked in very early in the game. [1]: https://github.com/sumdog/bee2/tree/master/lib https://github.com/sumdog/bee2/tree/master/lib
- tanilama 7y ago
  > They want to be a real AWS alternative They can't. Too small to grow big.
- timfrietas 7y ago
  You mean Vultr is pretty similar to DO :) When I worked at DigitalOcean all we could do was shake our head and laugh at how blatantly hard Vultr tried to copy what we did.
  - djsumdog 7y ago
    Yes, that's what I meant. :) DO did come first and Vultr pretty much copied everything with lower prices; but DO has matched a lot of those prices since then as well.
chadlavi 7y ago
I feel like that "this is not serious enough" feeling is an ironic result of the fact that they have such good UX.
- closeparen 7y ago
  DigitalOcean has always been great place to host single-server Rails/Django/PHP app. But support for more complex backend infrastructures targeted by the cloud providers, with network segmentation and load balancers and autoscaling clusters, has only started to grow in recently. There is nothing approaching any cloud provider's IAM.
  - apple4ever 7y ago
    I’d love to get a network segmentation option in DO. IAM is a big no though.
- davnicwil 7y ago
  Not sure if it's applicable in this case as I'm not a DO user, but this is definitely a thing. For instance, think about web forms for anything 'official' - it's almost as if the worse the UX is, the older the tech it seems to be built on even, the more legit it seems. It's a really counter intuitive effect.
  - ludamad 7y ago
    Then you find out about some guy in Japan accessing the web form via fax. What people don't often talk about old stuff is the long tail ecosystems compatible with it
    - davnicwil 7y ago
      Oh completely agree, not at all saying using old tech is bad in any way and it's completely clear why offical public service stuff prefers it. Just saying it's interesting how this then makes old-looking stuff seem more official, because you're used to everything official generally looking about 10 years old.
robohoe 7y ago
I really like DO's blogs/documentation. Fairly easy to get into versus AWS. On another hand, AWS has a very broad product offering with very broad documentation - some hit and miss though.
amerine 7y ago
Help me understand that “graduate” off sentiment towards Heroku? (Full disclosure: I work on Heroku for Salesforce).
- cloverich 7y ago
  (similar boat, use Heroku and some GCP in production for work) -- Heroku is great. But it is a bit limited and very expensive. It feels w/ modern cloud platforms you get something comparable with a little more flexibility for only a little more technical burden, _iff_ you have the chops. GCP / AWS are starting to encroach a bit w/ offerings like Cloud Run, I feel like they are one quality PM away from making a Heroku for Google type product that is a bit more powerful and a bit cheaper than Heroku. Conversely, I also feel like Heroku could round out their offering just a bit more (ex: built in robust monitoring and alerting, better deploy notifications and healthchecks, a simple custom metrics system) and really lock in that "premium basic" tier that would be perfect for most small to medium businesses.
  - LifeIsBio 7y ago
    Yea, I would second this. I've always enjoyed Heroku, but feel like I'm paying a premium because I don't know enough to do "real" cloud work. "If I were a more experienced developer, I could run this on AWS for pennies on the dollar". Honestly, I don't know where that sentiment comes from exactly. It's at least partially coupled with the fact that all of add-ons you would need to pay for to run a small business site add up pretty quickly, from what I can tell.
- wgerard 7y ago
  Hey! Totally. I meant that Heroku is incredible for bootstrapping projects, but as time moves forward I usually find myself migrating services from Heroku to just run on AWS directly. There's some friction with AWS (e.g. SSL termination) that Heroku makes incredibly easy, so I usually don't migrate until it's clear that a service is going to continue to exist in the medium term - otherwise the investment isn't worth it. Didn't mean to imply that was a widespread sentiment, of course! Just my personal one.

spectramax 7y ago

They're not shutting down or winding down. I am guessing that they hired a lot of people to start building an AWS competitor which is a steep battle (even with funding) and goes against the grain of DO philosophy - keep things simple and target DO for small-medium businesses (sub-100 employees). Investors went into DO thinking of a AWS/GCP/Azure unicorn, but after 6 years it appears to be a small rainbow pony than an almighty unicorn. This restructuring appears to be a realization of what happened with that vision and how it panned out, I may be wrong though. I personally love DO, I don't want to deal with AWS complexity for basic needs. Minimalism and simplicity certainly has value.

gist 7y ago

> I really do need to RTFM in depth for many AWS offerings Agree. But I think part of the plan with Amazon et al is that those who RTFM are locked in to the platform and therefore will be less likely to switch.

kbar13 7y ago

past a certain point you want your provider to do more and more for you (more features). like you mentioned, AWS is complex but they do pretty much everything for you. I've built systems that are just glued together AWS services.

wgerard 7y ago
totally, and people who know the ecosystem well are extremely productive at getting things up and running. Definitely a skill floor/ceiling thing going on.
toast0 7y ago
My experience is the opposite, for less critical systems, it's fine for the provider to do everything; as things get more critical, I want more control. At that point, all I need from the hosting provider is a server that stays up with a network that stays up. And contacts to skip bullshit triage when the network is broken and their monitoring doesn't show it.

gazelle21 7y ago

Its funny you mention that, I had the same thought comparing it to Heroku, can't quite put my finger on it why that is.

whitepoplar 7y ago

Perhaps because they don't heavily advertise large anchor customers? Sure, there are a bunch of brands on the front page, but that doesn't tell you whether they run 100% on DO or if they maybe used DO once for a side project. Digital Ocean needs a "Netflix", or at least more publicity around how their existing whales use their offerings.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

avree 7y ago

It's funny—my experience is pretty much opposite. At a certain scale AWS will provide really world-class support beyond just troubleshooting. DO forwards you to (granted, fairly in-depth) documentation an expects you to read it and engineer your own solutions.

wgerard 7y ago
totally. I mentioned this in another comment but it feels like a skill floor/ceiling thing to me. AWS/etc heavily reward you for investing time/money/etc but can be a bit more difficult to get started with without investing resources immediately, whereas DO is very easy to get up and running on but can be difficult when you encounter anything more complex.
bberenberg 7y ago
Are you over $500/month spend with DO? They offer a different tier of support at that point which has been solid in my experience.
iudqnolq 7y ago
As an on-and-off DO customer learning how to use Linux I find the documentation they've creates (payed ICs to create, I think) extremely useful and consistently of decent quality. When I see them in a Google search for an issue I'm always excited.

djsumdog 7y ago

Digital Ocean is pretty similar to Vultr: they offer a straight easy API for starting up VMs and managing DNS (I've written a tool that uses both of their API[1]; been meaning to do a post on the differences). It's kinda nice because you're just putting up VMs and there's not the type of vendor lockin you get with AWS/Azure/Google. That being said, DO is obviously trying to compete on that scale now. It has managed databases to compete with RDS, load balancers, and even managed k8s. They want to be a real AWS alternative, but when you start building around these components, you get locked in. If they're laying off people, it could adversely affect startups thinking of building around their services. And for people who think "Well I can just use another terraform provider" .. it really is not that simple at all. AWS/Azure/Google/DO are all very different. They have vastly different terraform providers/modules and you're pretty much writing an entirely new setup per each provider because of they way they handle firewalls, security, IPs, inbound-outbound, etc. The OpenStack API or any type of real standard has yet to emerge that branches all these offering. If you want "cloud" hosting (and most do because managing your own Postgres/MySQL clusters with backups and failover is a fucking bitch; especially if you're just starting out and want to get going fast), you need to realize you might need to be locked in very early in the game. [1]: https://github.com/sumdog/bee2/tree/master/lib https://github.com/sumdog/bee2/tree/master/lib

tanilama 7y ago
> They want to be a real AWS alternative They can't. Too small to grow big.
timfrietas 7y ago
You mean Vultr is pretty similar to DO :) When I worked at DigitalOcean all we could do was shake our head and laugh at how blatantly hard Vultr tried to copy what we did.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  Yes, that's what I meant. :) DO did come first and Vultr pretty much copied everything with lower prices; but DO has matched a lot of those prices since then as well.

chadlavi 7y ago

I feel like that "this is not serious enough" feeling is an ironic result of the fact that they have such good UX.

closeparen 7y ago
DigitalOcean has always been great place to host single-server Rails/Django/PHP app. But support for more complex backend infrastructures targeted by the cloud providers, with network segmentation and load balancers and autoscaling clusters, has only started to grow in recently. There is nothing approaching any cloud provider's IAM.
- apple4ever 7y ago
  I’d love to get a network segmentation option in DO. IAM is a big no though.
davnicwil 7y ago
Not sure if it's applicable in this case as I'm not a DO user, but this is definitely a thing. For instance, think about web forms for anything 'official' - it's almost as if the worse the UX is, the older the tech it seems to be built on even, the more legit it seems. It's a really counter intuitive effect.
- ludamad 7y ago
  Then you find out about some guy in Japan accessing the web form via fax. What people don't often talk about old stuff is the long tail ecosystems compatible with it
  - davnicwil 7y ago
    Oh completely agree, not at all saying using old tech is bad in any way and it's completely clear why offical public service stuff prefers it. Just saying it's interesting how this then makes old-looking stuff seem more official, because you're used to everything official generally looking about 10 years old.

robohoe 7y ago

I really like DO's blogs/documentation. Fairly easy to get into versus AWS. On another hand, AWS has a very broad product offering with very broad documentation - some hit and miss though.

amerine 7y ago

Help me understand that “graduate” off sentiment towards Heroku? (Full disclosure: I work on Heroku for Salesforce).

cloverich 7y ago
(similar boat, use Heroku and some GCP in production for work) -- Heroku is great. But it is a bit limited and very expensive. It feels w/ modern cloud platforms you get something comparable with a little more flexibility for only a little more technical burden, _iff_ you have the chops. GCP / AWS are starting to encroach a bit w/ offerings like Cloud Run, I feel like they are one quality PM away from making a Heroku for Google type product that is a bit more powerful and a bit cheaper than Heroku. Conversely, I also feel like Heroku could round out their offering just a bit more (ex: built in robust monitoring and alerting, better deploy notifications and healthchecks, a simple custom metrics system) and really lock in that "premium basic" tier that would be perfect for most small to medium businesses.
- LifeIsBio 7y ago
  Yea, I would second this. I've always enjoyed Heroku, but feel like I'm paying a premium because I don't know enough to do "real" cloud work. "If I were a more experienced developer, I could run this on AWS for pennies on the dollar". Honestly, I don't know where that sentiment comes from exactly. It's at least partially coupled with the fact that all of add-ons you would need to pay for to run a small business site add up pretty quickly, from what I can tell.
wgerard 7y ago
Hey! Totally. I meant that Heroku is incredible for bootstrapping projects, but as time moves forward I usually find myself migrating services from Heroku to just run on AWS directly. There's some friction with AWS (e.g. SSL termination) that Heroku makes incredibly easy, so I usually don't migrate until it's clear that a service is going to continue to exist in the medium term - otherwise the investment isn't worth it. Didn't mean to imply that was a widespread sentiment, of course! Just my personal one.