11–20 of 420 posts
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.
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.
If they're close to being profitable (likely given their past fund raising, and how long its been), why would they want to sell more of their business?
They may also want to finally go public. 8 years is a long time to wait for a return. And it seems to me the stock market is tired of these unprofitable unicorns doing IPOs (at the moment anyway).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 d…
They can't. Too small to grow big.
Everyone is seeing this as negative and a warning sign for DO... but they're an 8 year old privately owned company that has raised over $300m. The last time they obtained funding was a 130m credit line in 2016. It's been 4 years since then... and if they're still losing money, they likely need to either make this profitable, or they're going to need to raise more money. If they're close to being profitable (likely gi…
I mean, it's all sheer speculation, but I think it is equally likely that Digital Ocean is having a hard time vs. just restructuring to do some housekeeping... I don't know how any 600 person cloud company survives in the same world as AWS these days.
Everyone is seeing this as negative and a warning sign for DO... but they're an 8 year old privately owned company that has raised over $300m. The last time they obtained funding was a 130m credit line in 2016. It's been 4 years since then... and if they're still losing money, they likely need to either make this profitable, or they're going to need to raise more money. If they're close to being profitable (likely gi…
Everyone is seeing this as negative and a warning sign for DO... but they're an 8 year old privately owned company that has raised over $300m. The last time they obtained funding was a 130m credit line in 2016. It's been 4 years since then... and if they're still losing money, they likely need to either make this profitable, or they're going to need to raise more money. If they're close to being profitable (likely gi…
You could also read this as: Digital Ocean raised a $130M credit line and their creditors have noticed that profits aren't what they will need to be in X years time, hence the hair cutting. Their headcount only increased by 4% in the past six months. AWS increased its 10,000+ headcount by 16% in the same time period. I mean, it's all sheer speculation, but I think it is equally likely that Digital Ocean is having a h…