Navigator's Guide: DigitalOcean, Customer Success, and You

In the introduction, we said that this book would give you the tools and the understanding you need to run a successful infrastructure on DigitalOcean — but what is DigitalOcean, and who are we to tell you what to do?

What Is DigitalOcean?

DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider. Our mission from the start has been to provide an infrastructure experience that development teams love with the features your business needs.

We were founded in 2012, and today we have over 400 employees working out of our headquarters in New York City, our satellite offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Bangalore, India, and remotely across the world.

Because our cloud computing platform was built with simplicity at the forefront, managing infrastructure on DO is easy whether your business is running one virtual machine or ten thousand. Here are some of the products we offer:

• Droplets are more than just virtual machines. They are a scalable compute platform with free additional features, like Cloud Firewalls, Monitoring, Reserved IP Addresses, and DNS zone hosting, that allow you to easily run production applications.
• Kubernetes is DigitalOcean’s native support for the most popular orchestration tool for containerized applications. We’ll cover containers and Kubernetes more in other books and resources.
• Load Balancers automatically distribute incoming traffic across your Droplets, enabling you to build more reliable and performant applications by creating redundancy.
• Volumes are additional SSD-based block storage devices you can add to your Droplet to suit your database, file storage, application, service, mobile, and backup needs.
• Spaces is scalable and simple object storage to store, serve, backup, and archive any amount of web content, images, media, and static files for your web applications.

We move fast: we completed all of these features and product launches in the first six years of the company’s history, and our product roadmap promises constant iteration and further expansion of features.

You can find detailed information on our products and current pricing on digitalocean.com, and we’ll keep this book updated in the future as we expand and improve our product offerings.

Who Are We?

We, the authors, are Fabian Barajas and Jon Schwenn. We’re both Solutions Engineers on the Customer Success team at DigitalOcean.

Fabian Barajas joined DigitalOcean in 2015 as a Customer Success Engineer and became a Solutions Engineer in early 2017. He is an LPIC-1 and SUSE Certified Linux Administrator, and holds a number of certifications, including ComTIA Linux+ and A+.

Jon Schwenn has worked in multiple teams at DigitalOcean since 2015. His prior accomplishments include founding a specialty colocation service that hosted thousands of Mac servers, creating and administering a fairly large automotive internet forum, and building an e-commerece system from scratch with ColdFusion in 2001. It was different times back then. Jon is a Red Hat Certified Architect and has been using Linux professionally since 2003.

As a business customer, the Customer Success team is your dedicated resource for help with any platform-related issues. We can solve your problems, answer your questions, or connect you with other people at DigitalOcean who work directly on Product or Engineering.

Our whole team is here to support you: Customer Success Managers are your point of contact for strategic planning and any account concerns, and Customer Success Engineers provide 24x7x365 support through our support system and aim to respond to technical issues within 20 minutes.

We, the Solutions Engineers, help with strategic technical planning discussions, create code examples, and write proof of concept documentation. And sometimes write books.