2021 demonstrated that 'love is at our core'

This year was a pivotal one for DigitalOcean as we continue along our path to simplify cloud computing so developers and businesses can spend more time developing software that changes the world. Even during the second year of global pandemic-induced uncertainty, I am incredibly proud of the progress the DigitalOcean team has made in improving how we serve our customers, and still more excited about more progress on tap for 2022.  We are living a foundation in our values, that love is at our core.

We continue to invest in initiatives that support developers, startups, and small- and medium-sized businesses as they grow, and in March 2021 we took the important step of becoming a publicly traded company. Our IPO has enabled us to grow faster as we expand our business into new products that have been requested by our customers, such as adding managed MongoDB and serverless computing.

Importantly, we joined the Pledge 1% movement, making a pledge of 1% of our pre-IPO equity valuation, about $50 million, to Hollie’s Hub for Good and our expanding social impact program. Through this program, we have already supported critical projects like BigBlueButton, an open source virtual classroom that enables education.  I’m so excited for us to roll out our expanded plans for global community engagement early in 2022, we have a tremendous opportunity to give back and can’t wait to do even more in the future.

In 2021, DigitalOcean also committed to being a remote-first company. We’ve seen first-hand that when a company is committed to living its core values every day, teams can be productive and happy even when distributed across the world. Being remote-first doesn’t mean giving up on culture – it just means a shift in how we think about work culture away from a physical office and towards shared values, customer outcome oriented. We believe that by embracing remote work, we can create a more diverse and inclusive workplace while providing employees with greater flexibility to meet our company goals while making it easier to balance their personal lives.

Here are a few more highlights from 2021:

Product enhancements and acquisitions

We’ve continued to improve our core product offerings so that developers and businesses can achieve their goals. In 2021 we introduced Premium Droplets with faster Intel and AMD CPUs for increased options for improved performance. We also added MongoDB to our managed database offerings, enabling customers to use one of the most popular databases as a fully managed Database as a Service on DigitalOcean. We made numerous enhancements to DigitalOcean App Platform, such as the ability to connect apps to managed databases as trusted sources and forward logs to external systems for better analysis, and DigitalOcean Kubernetes benefited from a new control plane that provides high availability and takes just 30 seconds to spin up.

We also released upgraded load balancers, which can handle up to one million requests per second or one million simultaneous connections. DigitalOcean Marketplace also expanded in 2021, when we introduced numerous new 1-click apps for simple deployment, bringing the total number of apps hosted in the Marketplace to over 230. We made several improvements to the developer experience, including new versions of the DigitalOcean CLI, making updates to the DigitalOcean Terraform provider, and updating and expanding our product and API documentation.

DigitalOcean also demonstrated our ongoing commitment to product enhancements through two key announcements – our acquisition of serverless platform Nimbella, and the hiring of our new Chief Product Officer, Gabe Monroy, who brings a wide range of knowledge in the cloud native space and has first-hand experience in the needs of founders and startups. We are excited to continue our journey into serverless and other product innovations in 2022.

Our commitment to community

At DigitalOcean, Community is bigger than just us, and this year we furthered our efforts to provide valuable content for both the developer and small business communities. We hosted two iterations of our virtual conference, deploy, where we heard from DigitalOcean users on powering their business and building cloud native applications. We also completed our eighth Hacktoberfest, a month-long celebration of the open source community. This year, Hacktoberfest was focused on quality contributions, and we were pleased to hear stories from all over the world about participants’ meaningful contributions.

Hollie’s Hub for Good is DigitalOcean’s giving program which allows us to invest back into our global community through infrastructure credits, cash donations, and by giving visibility to vital projects. In 2021, Hollie’s Hub for Good supported projects that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and encourage economic growth. Projects we support include EVE list, which works to close the global gender gap in the workplace, QuestaGame, a global social enterprise that believes in working (and playing) together to protect life on our planet for a sustainable future, and Trusted World, which utilizes a network of first responders, social workers, and others to create a more effective donation process and address situational poverty. DigitalOcean employees also supported important causes by taking advantage of our employee charitable giving company match program, in which we doubled the $150,000 of employee donations in 2021.

We continued to show our commitment to the startup and small business community through the release of our Currents report on small and medium-sized businesses, their business challenges, and their needs for cloud solutions.

Finally, I want to acknowledge the tragic passing of two beloved colleagues in 2021, Hollie Haggans and Peeyush Gupta. The legacy that Hollie and Peeyush left us lives on within DigitalOcean, and we send love to their families at the end of this difficult year.  I can’t thank our broader DO team enough for the love and support they provided to the families of Hollie and Peeyush, a very powerful demonstration that Love is at our core.

Looking forward to 2022

As we look toward 2022, we are excited about the direction in which DigitalOcean is heading. We will continue to focus on our mission to simplify cloud computing and to serve developers, startups, and small businesses while building a team of passionate employees who embody DigitalOcean’s values. We look forward to enhancing our platform as we support our customers’ journey so developers and businesses around the globe can test ideas, build businesses, and realize their dreams.