CTO.ai is a DevOps as a service partner of DigitalOcean that specializes in migrations, Kubernetes, and scaling infrastructure. Over the past four years, they’ve worked with DigitalOcean to help customers migrate to DigitalOcean from other cloud providers, scale up using Kubernetes, and modernize complex architectures.

When CTO.ai first partnered with DigitalOcean in 2021, hands-on support for DevOps, architecture, implementation, and migrations hadn’t really been defined yet, explains Kyle Campbell, founder of CTO.ai. This meant CTO.ai provided suggestions and guidance on how to make a successful partnership program and ensured both companies could work together and—most of all—benefit the customers.

This close partnership means that CTO.ai knows how well DigitalOcean is suited to production-level workloads and rapidly scaling businesses by combining the simplicity that developers love with the scalability and reliability businesses need.

Helping organizations scale

As CTO.ai and DigitalOcean have grown, so has their ability to support customers at scale. Joint customer NoBid has rapidly grown since 2019. The organization currently supports six clusters across four global regions and 300,000 concurrent requests per second and has been able to scale and operate within budget with CTO.ai and DigitalOcean.

NoBid built its previous solution on AWS but soon realized it was not cost-effective for handling workloads over the long term. Its founders selected DigitalOcean in 2024 for its affordability, technical expertise, and partners. Still, the change from AWS would not be a lift-and-shift, so the DigitalOcean team called in CTO.ai to help with the migration. With high-speed, continuously growing infrastructure, NoBid needed many containers, Kubernetes, secure networking, load balancing, and S3-compatible storage.

Kyle and the CTO.ai team developed a migration framework, established a timeline, and started the transition to a new tech stack. Along with application conversion, they addressed potential networking traffic and egress concerns. With CTO.ai’s help, NoBid implemented scaling NAT gateways, static IPs, horizontal pod autoscalers, and buffer pods to address network traffic bursts and egress optimization.

As NoBid has continued to work with DigitalOcean and CTO.ai, they’ve been able to immediately increase cost savings, reduce vendor lock-in, and find more time for innovation.

NoBid’s success is just one example of CTO.ai and DigitalOcean’s joint expertise. Overall, this partnership directly helps customers, grows with the market’s needs, and provides the right tools for any business size.

“DigitalOcean isn’t just for self-service hobbyists. Sure, it’s great and simple, and lots of developers, 600,000 I believe, have used DigitalOcean over the last many years to successfully deploy workloads. But DigitalOcean is now working with very mature scaling startups and global infrastructure setups,” says Kyle.

This capability and support are essential to helping customers. As partners, Kyle and his team have seen firsthand how DigitalOcean makes it easy for companies to scale and reach their business goals through internal talent and partners like CTO.ai.

“DigitalOcean is focused on supporting teams of founders and engineers so they reach their goals. They bring in people like us to help you achieve that at effectively no cost to you,” says Kyle.

The DigitalOcean advantage

DigitalOcean’s portfolio includes powerful, scalable, user-friendly, and easy-to-deploy applications. This makes it easier for CTO.ai to map migration plans and work with customers to find the right applications for their infrastructure. It also means that companies can successfully grow with DigitalOcean, work with CTO.ai to address technical challenges, and futureproof their infrastructure.

CTO.ai’s CI/CD platform easily integrates with DigitalOcean offerings so organizations can quickly scale up DevOps workflows, Kubernetes, and Infrastructure as Code for containerized applications. Kyle and his team know that DigitalOcean will always have the necessary software and computing power available to customers to run their workloads and grow them as needed.

“Being able to have a level of capability, resilience, and scalability, like what DigitalOcean provides, brings an element of simplicity and cost savings [to customers],” says Kyle.

He adds that DigitalOcean provides personalized service and support from the business side. This really serves as a differentiator when working with companies. He’s done it both as a customer and a partner, but working with DigitalOcean really allows him and his team to come in on projects and provide specific feedback and technical expertise.

“The journey that you can take alongside DigitalOcean comes with a great deal of personalized support. And CTO.ai, as partners, want to actually get to know your business. How we work alongside DigitalOcean and the customers we support is very personal. We’re consistently in customer Slack channels getting to know each other and solving problems as they come up,” Kyle says.

Building the future

The partnership between CTO.ai and DigitalOcean has grown over the last four years to be a source of technological innovation and long-lasting connections. As customers grow and modernize their infrastructure, there’s only more room to grow and find new migration and scaling solutions.

“I haven’t found a migration that couldn’t be accomplished,” says Kyle. His team has helped all kinds of companies successfully migrate to modern application architectures. With technological expertise and DigitalOcean’s simple, scalable products, companies can efficiently and successfully migrate and upgrade their infrastructure—no matter what the future holds.