DigitalOcean Is An "Open Canvas" For Developers To Express Their Creativity

TFIR: Open Source, Cloud Native & AI/ML

"How Self Service is All About Empowering Developers" DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider which empowers developers with cloud services to help them deploy and scale their applications. Raman Sharma, VP of Product Marketing at DigitalOcean, talks about how their self-service model is all about optimizing the path of a developer. Sharma starts off by pointing out there are multiple paths to take for application building: The full DIY Infrastructure as a Service model, the Platform as a Service model, and the Cloud Native method. To this end, Sharma says, "...We believe in providing them [developers] an experience where they can serve themselves; they should not need help from an expert or a service provider, just to be able to get started with that platform. So that's kind of what we are focused on." Talking further about this self-service model, Sharma says, "The self-service model is about removing all friction, from the path of a developer towards successfully consuming your products, and going about their business." Sharma also indicates that DigitalOcean is not in the low-code/no-code space, but a platform for technical practitioners (people with slightly deeper technical skills) and that, "...From the point that you sign up on the website, to onboarding and getting started with your first project, and then the next step to adding more team members to your projects, we want to make sure that all of this is super seamless." To that end, DigitalOcean is "feverishly focused" on ensuring this experience for developers (and small development teams) is super optimal and that they have all of the tools and knowledge available to get started. With everything in place, those who develop on the DigitalOcean platform can use the services themselves and won't have to rely on someone else to get everything set up and configured. At the same time, DigitalOcean is seeing that, increasingly, developers care more about productivity and less about the underlying infrastructure. For that, Sharma says, "...We have created services like App Platform, which we released last year, which is a fully managed, Platform-as-a-Service offering, which actually runs on top of our compute and our Kubernetes infrastructure." Sharma follows up with, "But it provides an experience to developers, which is very seamless; they don't have to worry about managing or orchestrating the underlying infrastructure." Finally, Sharma says that DigitalOcean thinks of their cloud as an "...open canvas which is available for developers to come and express their creativity by building applications."