It is the beginning of the year and an opportunity for us to reflect on 2018 and share what’s upcoming for our community in 2019.

Last year, we shared details on the progress we’ve made on an ambitious roadmap in January and August. Here’s a recap:

• We kicked off 2018 with new Droplet plans that got even better with pooled bandwidth billing so that you can share your bandwidth allocations across all Droplets in your account and make it less likely that you will incur overage bandwidth charges.
• One of the areas we always look to improve is the developer experience, including how you manage your DigitalOcean service through our UI or our API. In March, we released a new Control Panel Dashboard, making it faster to access common resources and account information, as well as changes to the navigation with quick links to API and community documentation.
• In May, we updated our Load Balancers product, making it easier to deliver HTTPS using Let’s Encrypt with an automated integration and we added support for HTTP/2 to improve performance and security. We also lowered the pricing of Load Balancers by 50%, down to $10/mo.
• In June, we released a new DigitalOcean Product Documentation center, which contains overviews and quickstart guides on everything DigitalOcean has to offer, as well as How-Tos and Resource links to dive in deeper.
• In August, we released Projects, a new way to control and organize your infrastructure on DigitalOcean. These changes are designed to save you time, and make it easier to access the most important information as your infrastructure grows.
• In September we released a built-in CDN with Spaces with no additional costs. With this new capability, your Spaces content gets delivered much faster to end users from global edge locations around the world.
• Also in September, we added support for Custom Images so that you can bring your own environment to DigitalOcean and spin up Droplets using your own customized operating system.
• As many developers want to automate their creation and management of infrastructure using tools like Terraform, in October, we released version 1.0.0 of the DigitalOcean Terraform provider. We worked with the community to build support into the Terraform provider for all of the resources you typically use on DigitalOcean, now available as Terraform resources.
• We launched a managed Kubernetes beta in May, and made DigitalOcean Kubernetes available to all users in December. Kubernetes has become the standard for deploying containers to production, and well over 30,000 developers have used DigitalOcean Kubernetes to learn about Kubernetes and deploy container workloads.

What’s coming in 2019

Our Product and Engineering teams are focused on making the experience you love on DigitalOcean even better. We are focused on providing services that take away the operational burden from you so that small teams can continue to focus on what’s important for their business and worry less about the underlying infrastructure. We are also improving all of the tooling and integrations required to quickly deploy your applications to the cloud. This includes continuous improvements to the Control Panel, API, CLI, and supporting features such as Tags, Teams, and Projects.

Managed Databases

Late last year we opened up beta sign-ups for a new service that makes it easy to host your databases on DigitalOcean as a managed service. We are starting with supporting Postgres database engine and plan to release MySQL and Redis later in the year. We’ll share additional details in the coming weeks.

Application Marketplace

Our one-click applications have made it easy for many of you to launch your applications in the cloud. However, we believe we can improve the experience of getting started quickly by removing the complexity of installing and configuring common application building blocks and dependencies, such as development stacks, solutions, and services. In 2019, we plan to launch a curated Marketplace that will bring vendor applications and solutions to the large community that we have and give you even more choice in the solutions you need to get your business up and running. We’ll share additional details in the coming weeks.

Kubernetes

We are adding many new features to our Managed Kubernetes (DOKS) product, and plan to bring new cluster metrics, token-based authentication, a container registry, autoscaling, role-based access control support integration, support for deploying and managing workloads and other resources via the DigitalOcean UI, and the ability to upgrade your Kubernetes version automatically over the course of this year.

New Droplet Types

When we rolled out our CPU Optimized Droplets, we found that many users needed the consistently high performance of dedicated CPU resources. Our users have since asked for similar plans with higher memory options, and we’re working on providing high memory Droplets with dedicated CPUs. A new line of Performance Droplets called General Purpose Droplets will be in Limited Availability starting Q1.

Spaces

We will launch Spaces in Frankfurt earlier in the year and London subsequently, extending choice for users deploying applications globally. We will also add SSL Certificate support to the built-in Spaces CDN endpoints and subdomain support streamlining the process of deploying websites.

Developer Experience

As always, we’re focused on bringing the best possible experience to our customers. This year we’ll be adding project and tags support for all of our new products, as well as improving monitoring and insights across the portfolio. In addition, we’ll make it easier to create and manage your team at DigitalOcean.

Give Us Your Feedback

We have been busy building towards our vision of making it easier for developers to build modern applications. This is only a sampling of all the features and improvements we are planning for 2019. We hope they are lining up with the kinds of services you need, and we really want to hear from you on any ideas for what you’d like to see next! Please share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

Happy coding,

Shiv, VP Product