Latest products and features at DigitalOcean: August 2021

August was a busy month for DigitalOcean with teams focusing on addressing key customer feedback and making our platform more secure and easy to use. Below are some of the main features and capabilities we released this month.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Securely connect to Droplets using a new console

We are excited to introduce a new Droplet Console that will make it much easier to connect to your Droplets securely. The new Droplet Console provides one-click SSH access to your Droplets through a native-like SSH/Terminal experience. It also eliminates the need for a password or manual configuration of SSH keys. The new Droplet console is available to all Droplet users. Watch this video to learn how you can access your Droplet terminal through the new web console.

New Linux Distributions for Droplets

CentOS Linux is reaching end of life. CentOS Linux 8 reaches EOL at the end of 2021 and there will be no CentOS Linux 9. As potential replacements, we have released two new Linux distributions for Droplets: CentOS Stream 8 (centos-stream-8-x64) and Rocky Linux 8.4 x64 (rockylinux-8-x64).

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Managed MongoDB is now available in all regions

We recently announced the General Availability of DigitalOcean Managed MongoDB, a fully managed database as a service (DBaaS). Since the launch, we’ve been expanding the availability of Managed MongoDB in additional regions. We’re excited to announce that the service is now available in all of our datacenters.

New features and enhancements for App Platform

DigitalOcean App Platform is a fully managed solution that helps you build, deploy and scale your apps quickly. We have added several new features and capabilities to App Platform such as Trusted Sources and Alerts and Monitoring for better security and visibility into your apps. Below is a quick walkthrough video for Trusted Sources.

Read this blog for a full list of updates for App Platform.

Marketplace updates

We’ve launched new preconfigured 1-Click Apps in the DigitalOcean Marketplace to help you save time and remove the hassle of provisioning servers. These include:

• PhotoPrism: PhotoPrism is a privately hosted app for browsing, organizing, and sharing your photo collection. It makes use of the latest technologies to tag and find pictures automatically without getting in your way.
• Matrix (Synapse backend): Matrix is a decentralized, federated chat platform built on open standards. This 1-Click App includes everything you need to self-host your own Matrix system.

Cloud Native

Ability to add Kubernetes clusters in Cloud Firewall Rules

DigitalOcean Cloud Firewalls are a network-based, stateful firewall service for Droplets provided at no additional cost. You can configure inbound and outbound firewall rules that define conditions for incoming and outgoing traffic from the server. When defining these rules, you can now add Kubernetes clusters as sources and destinations. This helps you manage the flow of traffic between your Kubernetes cluster and different resources (Droplets) in a controlled manner.

Developer experience

Updates to DigitalOcean Command Line Interface (CLI)

We have released a new version of doctl, the official DigitalOcean CLI:

v1.63.0 - This release includes a number of new features:

• The database firewall sub-commands now support apps as trusted sources
• New monitoring alert sub-commands for creating and managing alert policies

v1.64.0 - This release includes support for managing App Platform alerts.

Updates to DigitalOcean Terraform Provider

v2.11.0 - This release includes support for setting the droplet_agent attribute and allows for setting app as a type.

v2.11.1 - This release includes some bug fixes.

You can check out the release notes to get up to date information about product updates, and read about updates from the previous month here.

We hope you’ll give these new products and updates a try. If you have an idea for improving our products or want to vote on other user ideas so they get prioritized, please submit your feedback. And if you have any questions, please feel free to ask them here.

Until next month,

Happy coding!

Pragya Pandey