I’m a fan of DigitalOcean. In a space (public cloud infrastructure) dominated by far bigger and deeper-pocket vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google, this plucky vendor has grown rapidly, continued to delight its customers, and retained a very focused view on what it is and, more important, what it isn’t.
While other platforms grow increasingly complex as they try to be all things to all people, DigitalOcean focuses 100 percent on being a developer-friendly cloud platform. It’s offerings are known for their simplicity and ease of consumption.
But that simplicity creates something of a difficulty—most every platform, even those focused on the small end of town, eventually needs to move up the food chain. As it does so, its customers start to demand more functionality. In delivering what these customers want, the platform invariably gets more complex, and what was once simple and elegant becomes big and unwieldy. While not a criticism per se, anyone who has taken a long look at (for example) Amazon Web Services’ list of available compute instance types will know what I mean.
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