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DigitalOcean S-1

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Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#231

Post by disgrunt »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #215
jiofih wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was a product that looked remarkably similar to ours As a developer, DO never looked anything like it. Linode was expensive and on the same playfield as Rackspace and a ton of other cloud hosts, very different from the instantly-spin-up-a-tiny-vm-for-five-bucks model. Their web UI also has always been miles ahead. The competition also didn’t have SSD as an option until much later, and that was a HUGE selling poi…

Lol, what? DO was basically a page for page copy of linode's site and product offering in 2011-2013.

They were both modeled after services like Slicehost I believe.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#232

Post by vinger »

tweetle_beetle wrote: post #195
staticautomatic wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also have some of the best technical documentation on the web.

I'm sure their own documentation is good, but certainly early on the tutorials always seemed to be a mess. Lots of similar articles written by different people with different structures and advice, without referencing other related tutorials. There seemed to be very little in the way of editorial control, but maybe that's better now. It was a good, cheap content strategy for SEO, but not a genuinely good resource.

Having 5 people install slightly different varations of a stack provided so much value it was and still is the best resource when installing a new stack.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#233

Post by riffic »

lloeki wrote: post #159
jiofih wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was a product that looked remarkably similar to ours As a developer, DO never looked anything like it. Linode was expensive and on the same playfield as Rackspace and a ton of other cloud hosts, very different from the instantly-spin-up-a-tiny-vm-for-five-bucks model. Their web UI also has always been miles ahead. The competition also didn’t have SSD as an option until much later, and that was a HUGE selling poi…

> As a developer, DO never looked anything like it. The UI, the simplicity, SSDs, additional block storage... but also the API and its doc, as well as IPv6, regions, snapshots/backups, and availability. Later on, load balancers, object storage and k8s. All of that much simpler than AWS and both better thought out and more featureful than Linode or OVH. DO truly deserved their success.

The API is a key point many people miss when they think of early DigitalOcean as just another VPS host.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#234

Post by utahcon »

Have been a user and fan of DO for years. Their product offering doesn't grow as fast as some cloud providers, but they are still my favorite for just about everything.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#235

Post by wakatime »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #10

I love DigitalOcean. The simplicity of their UI, friendly CLI tooling and (as a hosted k8s customer) the frequency of updates to their offerings. BUT: 1. Their web UI stability is terrible (constantly hangs and errors out) 2. Their hosted DB IOPS aren't competitive with other PaaS providers. There's also no way to scale DB size dynamically without upgrading to a new price tier which is overkill. 3. Their Kubernetes C…

Nothing is perfect. We use DigitalOcean Droplets because they're more bang-for-buck than AWS EC2 instances, especially if you're doing a lot of disk IO. However, even though it's more expensive we use AWS S3 instead of DigitalOcean Spaces because it's faster, more reliable, and replicated automatically. I wrote about these decisions recently here:

https://wakatime.com/blog/46-latency-of-digitalocean-spaces-...

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#236

Post by sneak »

yte15 wrote: post #225
sneak wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is that not only did they start out as incompetent, they actively downplayed early security issues and outright lied about certain aspects of their products. I found major, glaring security/architecture issues with their main product early on, and was told by DO staff to go full-disclosure because it was working as designed. When I did so, DO lied about the impact on their blog. Those lies are still up:…

Your issue was exactly, and I mean exactly, what I had in mind when I said “learning experiences” upthread. I followed it closely. Linode painfully learned the scrubbing lesson as well - and DO was in a worse position to learn it at the time, being forced to throw the scrub write load at SSDs that don’t like that type of load. That’s the real issue, honestly, that they probably started noticing SMART warnings from sc…

It's not tough to solve.

The whole scrub thing was a red herring: you don't need to scrub anything to not leak data, you just thin provision. It's (mostly) fine if customer data stays on your disks after they delete. It's not fine to give it to the next customer because you don't know how disk abstraction works.

My issue is mainly how they coped with it, which has nothing to do with their (at the time) technical incompetence: they simply lied about the effects.

Competent or not, lying on your corporate blog isn't a good choice. It doesn't take any special skills or training to be honest on your journey from incompetence to competence, all it takes is integrity.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#237

Post by joering2 »

sneak wrote: post #214
tgtweak wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really happy to see Ben and Moisey get this far. They are both extremely competent sysadmins and system architects too. They retained a lot of equity as well - good to see.

My experience is that not only did they start out as incompetent, they actively downplayed early security issues and outright lied about certain aspects of their products. I found major, glaring security/architecture issues with their main product early on, and was told by DO staff to go full-disclosure because it was working as designed. When I did so, DO lied about the impact on their blog. Those lies are still up:…

I second that. Over last 6 years I happened to login and see other people dashboard a few times. First time it happened hair raised up on my arms thinking someone else can see my stuff. I simply logout and logged back in. I never manage to delete or do any reckless stuff with other people servers. But I feel what the OP was going thru.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#238

Post by dumbsecreport »

tweetle_beetle wrote: post #195
staticautomatic wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also have some of the best technical documentation on the web.

I'm sure their own documentation is good, but certainly early on the tutorials always seemed to be a mess. Lots of similar articles written by different people with different structures and advice, without referencing other related tutorials. There seemed to be very little in the way of editorial control, but maybe that's better now. It was a good, cheap content strategy for SEO, but not a genuinely good resource.

Thats because a lot of it was lifted directly from the web. They paid people a stupid price per article to either write articles or copy paste documentation online while barely vetting it, only taking it down when people took the time to send in reports to staff. I'm sure things have improved since then.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#239

Post by yte15 »

sneak wrote: post #236
yte15 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your issue was exactly, and I mean exactly, what I had in mind when I said “learning experiences” upthread. I followed it closely. Linode painfully learned the scrubbing lesson as well - and DO was in a worse position to learn it at the time, being forced to throw the scrub write load at SSDs that don’t like that type of load. That’s the real issue, honestly, that they probably started noticing SMART warnings from sc…

It's not tough to solve. The whole scrub thing was a red herring: you don't need to scrub anything to not leak data, you just thin provision. It's (mostly) fine if customer data stays on your disks after they delete. It's not fine to give it to the next customer because you don't know how disk abstraction works. My issue is mainly how they coped with it, which has nothing to do with their (at the time) technical inco…

Yeah. Agreed. I unfairly walked back solve to “deal with” on you simply from knowing the considerations that go into bursts of write load every time a customer clicks “delete”.

At the time Linode had a host-side scrub daemon that simply ate LVs as customers deleted. It’s technically simple, but drive longevity and capacity on the host (the user is probably recreating their VM, for example) is where it gets tricky. External considerations. In the end scrubbing is basically killing a few dozen inodes of user data, but the architecture in VPS usually requires you to nuke the whole image, including what is ultimately the host’s 59th copy of Ubuntu. Just managing the iops without annoying neighboring customers is a challenge.

To my cloning point I made at the top of the thread, Linode was certainly no stranger to the reality distortion field when it suited, and I think that’s yet another thing DO copied. That vertical is closer to B2C since you’re usually dealing with individuals, not sales teams, and glossing over stuff is a bit easier than when your counterparty has a better engineering team than you.

Re: DigitalOcean S-1

#240

Post by wakatime »

ivraatiems wrote: post #128

I might have mentioned this before, but DigitalOcean's support is (or was, before I stopped being their customer) absolutely abysmal. I had a default card set up for auto billing. That card expired. I went to remove the default card -- you cannot remove a default card. Okay. I added a new card and tried to set it as default. It didn't take. (Refreshing the browser reverted the change.) So I tried another browser, ano…

Maybe they have support tiers? Every time I created a support ticket I got a response within an hour from a technical person. Their support responds much faster than AWS in my experiences.
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