
DigitalOcean launches its container service - neom
https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/11/digital-ocean-launches-its-container-service/
======
talkingtab
DO's kubernetes release is an an example of why I am a big fan. As a sole
developer, I can't afford high technical debt, but DO packages tech in a way I
can manage. I hope they keep on and wish other services (here's looking at you
AWS) would package their services as well.

~~~
fermienrico
I am a mechanical engineer who dabbles in web development from time to time. I
am forever indebted to DigitalOcean for creating a super easy platform for
someone who has no clue about VPS starting out. I know how to operate a linux
machine but not the slightest idea about how to host a website myself until I
came across DigitalOcean and their LAMP/LEMP tutorials.

Once I was comfortable with DigitalOcean, I tried launching a VPS on AWS and
holycrap it was so insanely complicated. Within 10 mins of creating an AWS
account, I was out. I understand that there is nothing wrong with AWS - it is
not for me, but DigitalOcean has fullfilled my needs in the most perfect way
with a huge knowledge base and detailed tutorials.

DigitalOcean is absolutely _incredible_.

~~~
bphogan
Hi! I'm a member of the Community team at DigitalOcean. I wanted to thank you
for your kind words about our tutorials. This kind of feedback means a lot to
us. We're glad we could help you get your web site set up.

~~~
speedster217
Just want to add on to this. Whenever I'm looking up a piece of software and I
find a Digital Ocean tutorial on it, I know I'm in good hands.

Have yet to find a tutorial that wasn't great!

~~~
marmot777
Amen. DO gets it when it comes to docs.

------
flurdy
Been a user of DOs beta kubernetes service and it works well.

Though I would say the title of the linked article is a bit misleading. It is
a Kubernetes as a service, like EKS, GKE and AKS.

But not vanilla container service a la ECS, Fargate, the former Docker Cloud,
etc.

~~~
tlrobinson
Maybe this is a dumb question, but couldn't/shouldn't a KaaS (and other
orchestration systems) just be a layer on top of "vanilla" CaaS?

~~~
derefr
CaaS-es (i.e. "things that present themselves as a Docker daemon or something
like it") don't allow you to provision IaaS-level resources like VMs or disks,
merely connect your containers to existing resources. When CaaS-es do allow
you to provision stuff (like e.g. Hyper.sh does), they do it through a direct
IaaS-level API that is separate from the functioning of the CaaS itself.

The major cloud providers' deployments of Kubernetes (and other server-side
persistent-orchestrator systems, like the venerable CloudFormation) are deeply
integrated into the cloud platform they're running on, such that the
orchestrator itself can provision resources for a container to run on as part
of deploying the container. This becomes important when elastically auto-
scaling a container, because each container might need e.g. its own disk, and
you can't create them ahead of time if you don't know how many you'll need.

This also means that, unlike a CaaS, k8s _et al_ can manage the very cluster
that k8s is running on, scaling it out to suit the size of the
current/estimated workload.

Theoretically, you can bootstrap k8s on top of a vanilla CaaS—this is how
minikube installs "using" your local Docker install, and this is how
deployable PaaSes like Flynn and Deis work. But this approach _doesn 't_
supply k8s with the cloud-specific integration it needs in order to provision
stuff. It might work if you're deploying against something with a standardized
API like OpenStack; but none of the major cloud providers are compatible with
such APIs, and so they need to build their own k8s plugins that call _their_
IaaS-level APIs, to make k8s work on their clouds.

Or, to put all that another way: if there were standard IaaS-level APIs for
k8s to hook into, Docker (and the CaaSes that either use or emulate it) would
just hook into those APIs itself, and there would be no need for a higher
orchestration layer.

~~~
johnwyles
tl;dr CaaS doesn't orchestrate the underlying infrastructure whereas k8s
primary purpose is to create a cloud agnostic way to orchestrate containers
and the infrastructure that they run on.

------
shujito
link this instead?

[https://blog.digitalocean.com/digitalocean-
releases-k8s-as-a...](https://blog.digitalocean.com/digitalocean-
releases-k8s-as-a-service/)

------
kull
Off topic in terms of the article itself, but I just wanted to give some love
to DO. We are very data and processing heavy startup, using DO for more than 2
years. We did not experience any issues, super easy to manage, great
performance, and super important for us - predictable cost.

~~~
Havoc
Their tutorials are also great. Half the time my googling about Ubuntu server
stuff end up on their pages

------
marmot777
I'm happy to see DO get some attention. I hope this means that really good
hosting services like DO can still thrive in the age of AWS. DO seems to be
doing well.

~~~
Zelphyr
I agree. I like that Digital Ocean takes their time to get a new product
offering right. It shows. Especially when you compare it to AWS, which we're
in the process of moving away from.

~~~
Rjevski
Just wondering which provider did you choose to go with instead of AWS?

~~~
Zelphyr
Digital Ocean. We compared AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Digital Ocean.
While the latter isn't an apples-to-oranges comparison like the other two are,
we found that the price, ease of use, and reliability made it the best choice.

I'm not yet sure about support since they don't offer any phone support. But
it can't be worse than Amazons where I once literally had to yell at the
support rep to stop talking because he just kept repeating himself, over and
over, and wouldn't let me move on.

------
xrd
I'm a long time happy DO user, this is exciting.

I've been managing multiple docker apps (using docker-compose) on DO for
years. Is there a guide I can use to transition my apps from docker-compose to
k8s? I've dabbled in k8s, but am not an expert at all.

Any suggestions?

~~~
bdcravens
Kompose has been around for a little while, which essentially "compiles" your
docker-compose.yml into K8S config files. However, Docker recently announced
ability to deploy directly from docker-compose:
[https://blog.docker.com/2018/12/simplifying-kubernetes-
with-...](https://blog.docker.com/2018/12/simplifying-kubernetes-with-docker-
compose-and-friends/)

My understanding is that you'll still need to do some work, especially if you
are building via compose instead of pointing to an image on a registry.

~~~
xrd
Yes, there is still a lot of work that requires a lot of knowledge about k8s.
Kompose up does not just work, but it seems like DO could make that a simple
set of commands with better documentation.

------
rfinney
Serious question: Is there an emerging cross platform workflow language to
just write stuff to run on any cloud/container hosting setup?

The idea would be to be portable, avoid vendor lock-in and take advantage
price differences or quickly route around a system failure in one of the
providers.

~~~
mark-ruwt
We rely on bash.

Each machine that's spun up is built from scratch via one command-line call.
The first half of the process interacts with each hosting API (we rely on
DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr primarily), to build a clean slate machine
with all of the packages and libraries that we expect.

The second half of the process runs the actual build process, building the
instance step-by-step on top of the clean slate, blissfully unaware of which
hosting provider it lives on.

This model allows us to be portable and avoid vendor-lock in, and a cross-
provider infrastructure lets us gracefully handle system failures while
keeping costs down.

~~~
wise_young_man
I made something similar and turned it into a service [1] focused on
WordPress, but unfortunately there hasn't been much interest from people as I
thought there would be, though that could be due to my lack of marketing.

My goal was the same, to make hosting more portable with features like
snapshotting and restoration of WP sites across servers and to even eventually
expand beyond just servers, to bring in domain registrars and cloud storage to
be able to move things around easier. For example: you have a site hosted on
AWS EC2 with DNS at Namecheap and nightly backups at Dropbox and let's say the
AWS Virginia region goes down. You create a new server in Digital Ocean and
restore the snapshot from Dropbox and the linked DNS at Namecheap is auto
updated.

The more I thought about this though, I began to realize that maybe these
features wouldn't be useful to the audience I wanted to target, which was
people who wanted to grow from shared hosting and have something reliable and
less noisy neighbors, but still more affordable than managed WP hosts and
lastly more control (bring your cloud/server provider).

[1]: [http://pagefog.com](http://pagefog.com)

~~~
kkarakk
some unsolicited feedback: your name is terrible(unrelated to your product in
any way) and your website doesn't communicate the problem you say you're
solving all i get from your sites landing page is "wordpress hosting" which is
not exactly uncommon scrolling to the bottom shows me some cloud providers.
makes me think you just help people host wordpress in the cloud

------
tyingq
So now that's managed K8S, managed databases, load balancers, a cloud firewall
that's partially VPC like, object storage and block storage.

Curious what's next. Lambdas maybe?

~~~
thinkshiv
We have a big roadmap for 2019. Queues are interesting and so are functions in
general. Nothing to share today but those are items we are assessing for
future roadmaps :)

~~~
wasd
Is application hosting (heroku, app engine, elb) on the roadmap?

~~~
jxub
Dokku is somewhat similar to all of them.

~~~
digianarchist
It's not multi-node though right?

~~~
jxub
I don't think so, at least not by default.

------
paraditedc
I use DO for my personal website and pet projects and it works well.

However, I am curious if any medium to big-sized tech companies are using DO
in production. As far as I know, everyone is using AWS, GCP or Azure. What's
DO's target audience?

~~~
t3rabytes
[https://www.digitalocean.com/customers/](https://www.digitalocean.com/customers/)

A pretty decent list of high profile tech companies are listed on their
customer page.

~~~
paraditedc
Ah nice. Didn't know about this page. Impressed that ghost is on the list.

------
arendtio
I am kinda confused... On the one hand, most people here seem to be fans of
the DO services and praise their simplicity, on the other hand, I see their
page an wonder what they are offering...

The names of their services seem to be equally confusing as the AWS names.
Yes, overall their portfolio is closer to the actual use-cases (as in 'I want
to have a blog' -> they have an offer for that), but I am still wondering what
a droplet is (looks somehow similar to a Virtual Private Server).

When Hetzner released their cloud service earlier this year, I tried it, loved
it and still do. Sure they don't offer the same products (e.g. no S3/Spaces),
but at least they use established technical terms instead of some made up
marketing names you have to learn for again for every new cloud hoster you
want to try.

~~~
Drdrdrq
When you say "Hetzner Cloud", what exactly do you mean? I have checked their
marketing pages and they only seem to offer IaaS - is this correct?

~~~
arendtio
You are probably correct. Their product range is quite limited and probably
qualifies as IaaS. But on the other hand, everything fits very nicely together
(e.g. adding a backup plan for your servers is just a matter of a few clicks
and if you don't like clicking through a Web interface: Their API is quite
reasonable and easy to use too).

------
wayoverthecloud
I hear great things about DO and I really want to try it out but DO doesn't
accept payment from our country. The same $5 droplet costs $25 here. I really
hope you guys expand to the developing countries.

~~~
h1d
Waiting on Japan region. Most major ones have presence in Japan.

------
codyb
I've been a huge fan of digital ocean ever since I started renting a 5 dollar
vps several years ago.

Their UX consistently is easy to navigate, has great documentation, and looks
great as well.

I may not be in the category of users that requires or needs many of the
features they've released, but I'm consistently impressed by how easy it is
for me as a non devops engineer to grok exactly what each new feature they
release is.

This looks super neat, I don't have any need for kubernetes as a small time
vps consumer, but always happy to see them move forward in this manner.

~~~
dorgo
Usually, I'm never satisfied with products/services and always wonder how they
managed to screw up. To counter this behaviour I created a list with things
which just work and I have nothing to complain about. DO is on this short
list.

------
segmondy
As someone that got the k8s invite and have been experimenting with it on DO,
I just want to say that I like and this was the main reason I decided to stay
instead of leaving for GCP

------
barbecue_sauce
Meanwhile, Linode fails to innovate.

~~~
nsgf
Well, Linode fails at basic security, so...

~~~
barbecue_sauce
Can I have more info on this?

~~~
barrow-rider
Basic google search will show lots. Short version is they've been hacked
notably at least once.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=linnode+hacke&ie=utf-8&oe=ut...](https://www.google.com/search?q=linnode+hacke&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8)

------
kalmi10
Do I understand correctly that they provide the manager nodes for free?

~~~
yebyen
Yes, this is the pricing model for everyone except EKS/AWS as I understand it.
Manager nodes are bundled with whatever you spend on your worker nodes.

Google has gone so far with GKE as to offer HA masters distributed across
availability zones at no extra cost. (On the day that Amazon announced EKS
general availability, if I remember correctly, which is priced at $250/mo base
cost, before you even get around to spend anything on worker nodes.)

~~~
eddiezane
Eddie from DigitalOcean here.

Just want to call out that our worker node pricing is the same as our Droplets
(servers). There is no price markup on using our managed service. In fact it's
cheaper than deploying it yourself on DO because you don't have to pay for the
master node.

~~~
yebyen
Yes! Hi Eddie, I'm Kingdon we met at RailsConf :D

I've been using Kops with Digital Ocean for some time on-and-off, comparing it
to the new managed offering which I've been using in limited release, and it
works great (either way).

The main disadvantage of Kops being (besides that it's Alpha only, and not
managed), I will pay for all of the nodes I use. It should be clear that
managed k8s offers a direct cost savings pretty much everywhere it's offered.

(It would be clear, if AWS was not currently leading the broader market and
offering EKS with a price model basically contradicting every other vendor's.)

------
alfg
Love Digital Ocean! I've been a member since early '13 and I still use it
monthly to host my projects as an open-source developer.

I love everything from their clean design, great tutorials and easy of use for
everything VPS related.

I hope the best for them.

------
embwbam
I’m just sitting down to do a new startup, but I’ve been out of the devops
game for a few years. I feel behind.

What tools/platforms/hosts should I use?

The system will be your standard API+Database+Event bus+workers. I’m a fan of
digital ocean and I’ve never bothered to learn AWS (besides S3). I’m very
familiar with docker compose, but I’ve never gone deeper than that.

This is a first year startup, we aren’t cost constrained but we are extremely
time sensitive.

Should I use Kubernetes? Or Is there something easier that will better serve
us the first year?

~~~
duncan-donuts
I think it kind of depends on what you're familiar with. If you're a rails dev
and you can build something crazy fast with rails vs anything else I'd just do
that. If you're used to working in event-driven microservices environments,
then do that. I'm working in an environment using node microservices, mysql,
rabbitmq, with k8s and it works really well. I wouldn't say we're _faster_
because of k8s, but k8s really helps us move quickly once we get a service
deployed to the cluster.

I'm also working on a start up, and chose to start with heroku and a PHP
monolith (with a handful of microservices to do some of the heavy lifting)
because those are the things that allow me to move fast. If we ever make some
money and the product does find market fit, we'd probably move to something
like k8s, but it definitely isn't a part of the early stages for us. YMMV
/shrug

------
jimaek
Hopefully they offer easy upgrades and high availability. I always loved the
simplicity of their services. Would also love a way to deploy 1 app to
multiple locations with ease

------
binaryapparatus
Sorry if off-topic: How does DO compare to Linode? I have lots of experience
with Linode but since I hear good things about DO I would love to try it out.

~~~
lugg
In my (personal) experience, you trade linodes customer service for digital
oceans ssd speed.

Neither have very good CPU stats.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14055243](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14055243)

~~~
h1d
Where does it say Linode's perform isn't good? Any source DO has better disk
speed?

------
9diov
It is good and all that they provide more services but why can't they provide
the bread and butter of IAAS: virtual networking (aka VPC) - the ability to
set up a virtual router and other nodes inside a private network. We are DO
customer currently and need to hack around this limitation for quite a while
now and it is the main reason we want to switch away.

~~~
neom
[https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/networking/private-
network...](https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/networking/private-networking/)

~~~
9diov
DO's "private" networking was not even truly "private" previously as it was
shared among its customers. Only recently did it get to the point that the
"private" network is separated from the rest. Anyway, even the new "private"
network does not allow for something like installing a custom DHCP server and
configuring custom subnet for the nodes inside. One of the most common use
cases is to route outbound traffic from all the nodes inside a private network
through a public gateway and DO's current configuration does not allow that.

------
slics
They are by far the simplest cloud platform one can use. They for sure honor
the best principal (KISS) in Software Development community.

------
ksec
I wish DO implement something like Upcloud [1] flexible plan.

I could get 20x Core, 20Gb Ram, 50GB SSD for $250 / Month or $0.35/Hr. This
truly allows you scale up and Scale out with all the flexibility.

[1][https://upcloud.com/pricing/](https://upcloud.com/pricing/)

------
jgh
i wish they would launch gpu instances :(

~~~
thinkshiv
We are working on this but don't have a date to share today. I know many of
our customers want it and we may be able to offer it in later 2019.

------
iends
How do people do HA with DO? Coming from the AWS world I’m used to running in
3 or more AZs.

------
firemancoder
I used to view Digital Ocean as kind of a play toy, good for experimenting and
not much else, but these days they're a key player for sure and they've been a
super reliable VPS host. Can't wait to try out some container stuff.

------
pbowyer
Is Kubernetes now accepted as a way to deploy reproducible single servers, or
is it for projects at scale?

I've worked on the assumption it's for clusters (10+) but if DO now support it
- an alternative to puppet/ansible?

~~~
cabraca
with the complete control plane managed by DO it gets more appealing for
projects with smaller scale.

personally, for single servers i still use just plain docker or docker-
compose.

------
ryanqian
DO is great, I like it very much for personal project. But it's worth give a
try Google cloud as it will remind me there is a cutting edge cloud service
there, just in case I will need them someday.

------
radimm
Hmm, now all it needs is just a comprehensive tutorial for somebody who
ignored the whole container fuss so far (happy with Ansible). How to get from
0 to 100 to use Kubernetes?

~~~
riffic
It's a hard nut to crack. What I've done myself is to jump into any book
published about Kubernetes and to do some online training through a couple of
different MooCs. This may be a good starting point:

[https://github.com/ramitsurana/awesome-
kubernetes#books](https://github.com/ramitsurana/awesome-kubernetes#books)

[https://github.com/ramitsurana/awesome-
kubernetes#interactiv...](https://github.com/ramitsurana/awesome-
kubernetes#interactive-learning-environments)

~~~
yebyen
> A curated list for awesome kubernetes

I've seen this list before and it is super comprehensive. Thanks for linking
it; I need more like this for my "extreme breadth of choices" slide, when I
present to my coworkers who are not using k8s yet, to emphasize how many
choices there actually are.

------
webo
Having the workers on public droplets is very inconvenient. Are there plans to
put them in private networking? (VPC / private subnet in AWS terms)

------
wenc
Folks who have tried this: how does it compare to GKE in terms of ease of use?
(my impression is GKE has the best offering of all the public clouds)

------
Already__Taken
Maybe I'm too cheap but I don't see an option for 5/mo nodes in any DC,
they're starting at 10 or 15.

~~~
yebyen
Hmm! I think this has changed since the beta.

Why not try a cluster with a smaller scaling group? You can create a cluster
with only one node in it, but what is it that you are trying to do on top of
your Kubernetes? In my experience with growing clusters, you probably want to
scale your per-each individual node size up before you want to scale up the
number of nodes in your cluster. (You might even find that you really need
only one big node, say for your databases, and want to build a heterogeneous
cluster with an autoscaling group of little nodes and that one big node.
That's a possibility with node pools on DO K8s.)

An ideal cluster size for me is probably 5 nodes with ~8-16GB RAM each. You
could make it still worthwhile to do the cluster thing with probably only 2
nodes at ~1-2GB each, but that'd be pushing it.

I am practiced at making clusters cheap, actually I once was published in the
Deis blog, an article about how to deploy Deis v1 PaaS in a highly available
fashion for as cheap as possible.

Many of those lessons from nearly a year of research that I did on the topic
prior to that publishing, still apply on modern Kubernetes clusters; but many
of them don't, and still others are out the window completely on these managed
environments, where now it seems possible to get pretty much the same idea of
"High Availability" as I was aiming for, but for much cheaper and with better
guarantees.

For instance, since you are not running etcd for yourself (it runs under the
hood, on the management plane) there is no specific rule that says you must
have at a minimum 3 or preferably 5 nodes to keep a stable cluster anymore.
This was the basics of learning to wield CoreOS and Fleet 101!

Consensus is handled on the masters, and that consensus is subject to split-
brain problems, so this knowledge is still important, but you don't need to
have it yourself. In many more basic clusters with managed systems like GKE
and DOK8s, this knowledge is practically reliquary! Two nodes may ensure that
one is there to pick up the slack when the other has a fault. Exactly how
you'd imagine it should work without a Computer Science degree. But with two
nodes, ... since you'll probably never see a fault like that ... and the whole
environment is self-healing, even if one happens on your watch, might never
even have to know about it.

------
speedplane
Every other service has had containers for years. I'm not sure this is an
exciting product announcement.

------
peterwwillis
Great job! Maybe now they'll have time to adjust their ssh-keygen
documentation to fix their password cracking vulnerability.
([https://latacora.micro.blog/2018/08/03/the-default-
openssh.h...](https://latacora.micro.blog/2018/08/03/the-default-
openssh.html))

~~~
diminoten
Yeah, how dare a company do two things at once!

------
cremp
DigitalOcean has always been behind the curve of these things. All of the
other big cloud platforms have had this for at least a few months.

I haven't actually seen anything 'new' come out of DigitalOcean in years.

~~~
parhamn
Were they ever 'new' in anything? I use them for small personal projects
(they've gotten a lot more stable recently). I never thought of them as an
innovative cloud provider but just one that was cheap and easy.

~~~
chrisweekly
Same here. IME, DO is a great choice for many projects, because it's
inexpensive, straightforward and reliable. I wouldn't trade any of those 3
attributes for "innovative".

------
johnklos
This would be nice if the company didn't ignore all of the spam which comes
from their network and the spamvertized sites they host. They deliberately
ignore reports sent to their abuse address and attempt to avoid responsibility
by making people who want to report abuse jump through hoops to break down
spam and submit it in a web form.

Companies which protect spammers will never get any business from me, plus
their email reputation is already pretty crappy, so why would I ever want to
run containers on their networks?

------
lonk
Digitalocean also should produce and sell chairs, sofas, yoghurt, car tires
etc...

~~~
raiyu
Thanks for the feedback, but we aren't Amazon =]

\- DigitalOcean cofounder

~~~
lonk
But you started to compete with your customers. Good luck.

-DigitalOcean ex-customer

~~~
jermaustin1
Did you try to launch your own cloud offering on someone else's cloud? Did you
expect the other cloud would never expand their offering?

I doubt they ever tried to compete with you, and probably didn't even know you
were doing something similar. You were just able to come to market before they
felt they were ready with a similar product.

