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I’m surprised by this. Digital Ocean is in no position to be splurging on new revenue streams. They’re underwater and making a loss [0]. They’ve got growing re

I’m surprised by this. Digital Ocean is in no position to be splurging on new revenue streams. They’re underwater and making a loss [0]. They’ve got growing revenue but falling profits and they’ve got more debt than assets. They may want to raise their droplet prices, or issue more stock and then refocus on making their business profitable. [0] valustox.com/DOCN

malfist 3y ago
So that's why my droplet increased costs by 50% last year.
skrtskrt 3y ago
I worked there relatively recently. DigitalOcean is organizationally incapable of making anything in-house anymore. I want to blame leadership - and to be clear, leadership sucks - but the problems are pervasive through every layer of the organization. The only significant launches in the last 4-5 years have all been acquisitions or built by partner companies and whitelabeled. Every system and every team has massively circular dependencies on one another , so it's just a massive circle of "we can't move until they move". The tech debt is insane. Everything is slowed down by terribly-run and massively underfunded internal "platforms" teams for kubernetes, CI/CD, various internal databases, etc. If you want to build something useful you basically have to ignore upper management and do it in secret until it's done and so integral to the systems that they have no choice but to allow you to support it. Asking leadership outright to invest in minor maintenance for systems the entire company depends on is never approved. The bar for engineering practices, code quality, and system design quality is comically low. All the systems are massively distributed, but there is no understanding of distributed systems issues. I was told multiple times that "CAP theorem doesn't apply here" and gaslit that an asynchronously replicated MySQL instance that sometimes spiked to multi-minute replication lag to the read replicas should just be used as if it were completely consistent between master and read replicas. Tons of stuff was just run as singletons with hand-rolled in-memory rate limiting to avoid having to understand distributed locking or semaphores. These systems inevitably start falling over a few months after creation, but you're not allowed to evolve it into a correct system, you just have to support that garbage forever. Brain drain everywhere due to low salaries. Even engineers barely capable of committing working code were getting fat raises to leave.
re-thc 3y ago
They have been buying companies non-stop for a while. It's their new operating model.
- AYBABTME 3y ago
  What would be the strategy you think they're going for?
  - re-thc 3y ago
    The I pretend I know what I'm doing strategy. Most acquisitions fail. It's a difficult path unless it fits a very specific need. Yet a common management / product strategy is to buy random companies as though they are ingredients of a dish and think it'll just work. Digital Ocean to me has lost their core focus and appeal. They aren't upgrading their hardware, software and other crucial pieces of their infrastructure. There's been gimmicks, acquisitions and marketing. Someone said the executives there don't believe they can compete with the big cloud providers and so are poking at different areas to see what works.
    - FredPret 3y ago
      I love DO as a user and not an investor, but their main value to me is that they have public-facing IPs. I could easily host all my sites on a single AMD machine under my desk, if only I had a good way of routing from the internet to my desk. I would be closer to nine fives than five nines, but that's good enough even for many commercial sites, including mine.
      - z3t4 3y ago
        Just contact your ISP to get a public IP. You might not get a static IP, but you can configure a dhcp client to request your old IP when reconnecting after a power outage. Set DNS TTL reasonably low like 12 hours so that you can recover if you do get another IP. Another way is to signup for a cheap VPS and use a tunnel to your home server. There's lots of really cheap VPS's with 128MB of memory that is plenty if you just want a tunnel.
impulser_ 3y ago
You can say this about the majority of tech companies. Cloudflare is unprofitable and they are used by the majority of the web.

malfist 3y ago

So that's why my droplet increased costs by 50% last year.

skrtskrt 3y ago

I worked there relatively recently. DigitalOcean is organizationally incapable of making anything in-house anymore. I want to blame leadership - and to be clear, leadership sucks - but the problems are pervasive through every layer of the organization. The only significant launches in the last 4-5 years have all been acquisitions or built by partner companies and whitelabeled. Every system and every team has massively circular dependencies on one another , so it's just a massive circle of "we can't move until they move". The tech debt is insane. Everything is slowed down by terribly-run and massively underfunded internal "platforms" teams for kubernetes, CI/CD, various internal databases, etc. If you want to build something useful you basically have to ignore upper management and do it in secret until it's done and so integral to the systems that they have no choice but to allow you to support it. Asking leadership outright to invest in minor maintenance for systems the entire company depends on is never approved. The bar for engineering practices, code quality, and system design quality is comically low. All the systems are massively distributed, but there is no understanding of distributed systems issues. I was told multiple times that "CAP theorem doesn't apply here" and gaslit that an asynchronously replicated MySQL instance that sometimes spiked to multi-minute replication lag to the read replicas should just be used as if it were completely consistent between master and read replicas. Tons of stuff was just run as singletons with hand-rolled in-memory rate limiting to avoid having to understand distributed locking or semaphores. These systems inevitably start falling over a few months after creation, but you're not allowed to evolve it into a correct system, you just have to support that garbage forever. Brain drain everywhere due to low salaries. Even engineers barely capable of committing working code were getting fat raises to leave.

re-thc 3y ago

They have been buying companies non-stop for a while. It's their new operating model.

AYBABTME 3y ago
What would be the strategy you think they're going for?
- re-thc 3y ago
  The I pretend I know what I'm doing strategy. Most acquisitions fail. It's a difficult path unless it fits a very specific need. Yet a common management / product strategy is to buy random companies as though they are ingredients of a dish and think it'll just work. Digital Ocean to me has lost their core focus and appeal. They aren't upgrading their hardware, software and other crucial pieces of their infrastructure. There's been gimmicks, acquisitions and marketing. Someone said the executives there don't believe they can compete with the big cloud providers and so are poking at different areas to see what works.
  - FredPret 3y ago
    I love DO as a user and not an investor, but their main value to me is that they have public-facing IPs. I could easily host all my sites on a single AMD machine under my desk, if only I had a good way of routing from the internet to my desk. I would be closer to nine fives than five nines, but that's good enough even for many commercial sites, including mine.
    - z3t4 3y ago
      Just contact your ISP to get a public IP. You might not get a static IP, but you can configure a dhcp client to request your old IP when reconnecting after a power outage. Set DNS TTL reasonably low like 12 hours so that you can recover if you do get another IP. Another way is to signup for a cheap VPS and use a tunnel to your home server. There's lots of really cheap VPS's with 128MB of memory that is plenty if you just want a tunnel.

impulser_ 3y ago

You can say this about the majority of tech companies. Cloudflare is unprofitable and they are used by the majority of the web.