DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider that helps developers deploy and maintain applications at scale. From their products and services to pricing, DigitalOcean has singularly focused on simplicity; allowing teams to dive in and get exactly what they need. Keep reading to learn more and get started by joining their free trial!

Explainer Video

In this introductory explainer video, you are taught by packetcode how to quickly set up a DigitalOcean droplet. This tutorial provides insight to the ease of setup and transparency of cost for the consumer.

DigitalOcean Details

When considering what cloud infrastructure to use, you have most likely heard of AWS and may be considering using it. As big and well known as AWS is, why would you choose DigitalOcean? The simple answer is that DigitalOcean is not competing with AWS at all. DigitalOcean is laser focused on the needs of small to medium size companies and delivers simple, straight-forward, transparently priced products and services.

DigitalOcean’s bread and butter has been their Droplets (servers) which host the applications and are configurable by the user. Overtime they added support for Kubernetes applications to manage containerized apps and are now offering a fully managed service called “App Platform”. App Platform is meant to allow the user to only be concerned with the application and be hands off with infrastructure needs. It utilizes their existing infrastructure products and the cost is determined by build transfer size and time.

DigitalOcean also has offerings for databases, object storage, and networking products. Of course there are choices to be made with each product (size, performance, etc.), but those are simple as well.

DigitalOcean Products and Pricing

More specific details about the pricing for each DigitalOcean product can be found on the pricing page of the DigitalOcean website.

Droplets

• Deploy in seconds
• Scale up on demand
• Run any workload – from mission critical apps to low traffic sites

Managed Kubernetes

• Simple, managed, Kubernetes
• Free control plane included
• Scale automatically, increase availability

App Platform

• Build, deploy and scale apps quickly
• No infrastructure management required
• Highly scalable

Managed Databases

• Worry-free setup and maintenance
• Free daily backups, automated failover
• PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Redis

Spaces Object Storage

• S3-compatible object storage
• Highly scalable
• Built in CDN

Volumes

• Block Storage
• Highly available
• Easy to scale, resize, and move between droplets

Load Balancers

• Let’s Encrypt and HTTP/2 support
• Compatible with Droplets and DigitalOcean Kubernetes

Container Registry

• Easily store and manage private container images
• Transfer container images over high-speed HTTPS connections to servers across four continents

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In this introductory explainer video, Simplilearn teaches you the benefits that AWS provides by using an example company and walking through a common pain point.

AWS Product Details

It is well known that AWS is used by large corporations; however, their products and pricing models can also work for small to medium sized businesses. AWS focuses on low-cost resources, scalability, and wide variety of technology. This is especially useful for companies that are unsure of their growth or have fluctuations in traffic. They maintain a high level of security. All their cloud services are compliant with the most security-sensitive organizations and that benefit trickles down to all consumers (read more here and here).

The final price tag is highly variable since the products are charged by compute time (time used). Two of the more common products that will drive the price are Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3).

EC2

EC2 is simply servers, called instances, as a resource and each available type is listed by CPU, memory, storage, and network performance. A company may choose to use one small machine, many small machines, one big machine, etc. These instances are fully configurable and can be used to host any software. They can be clustered together and load-balanced to provide zero down time. If one instance goes down, another can be stood up to replace it. The combinations and flexibility is endless and all catered to the need of the business. This is the backbone for many other AWS services.

S3

S3 is a dynamic object store for to hosting any kind of data (images, PDF’s, and more). The objects are stored by user defined paths and secured by configurable security policies. S3 is not only useful as a dumping grounds for data. It can also be used to host static websites when coupled with AWS’ content distribution network (CDN), Cloudfront. This pattern delivers content globally at high speeds for an unbeatable price (learn about it here). Due to its versatility and low-cost, S3 empowers entities from individuals to large organizations and all in between.

These two products have been and continue to be paramount to AWS’ success. Of course, they can be used through secure, convenient APIs and can be automated to grow or shrink as needed.

AWS Pricing

It’s hard to put an average cost to new users since pricing varies by need. However, any user can start with a minimal setup from low tens of dollars (USD) per month (even less for testing) and scale up as needed. Remember that these are variable expenses and you’re only charged for what you use. If you decide to only have services functioning for a portion of the month, you will only be billed for operational hours. AWS provides a useful pricing calculator to help you estimate your costs. Be sure to use their 12 month free trial to get your feet wet!

Here’s a helpful video by ITProTV if you find yourself needing help with the pricing calculator.

Specific details about pricing for each AWS service can be found on the pricing page of the AWS website.

EC2 t3 Instance Pricing

There are a wide variety of instances to select from which can be filtered by region, operating system, instance type, and vCPU. If you want to browse the full list, go here. For our purposes, we’ll focus on the commonly used t3 instances because they are low cost and general purpose so a few of those sizes will be sampled here.

Main Features

• balanced between compute, memory, and network resources
• burstable CPU performance (the CPU can exceed the base performance)
• geared for general purpose workloads
• low cost

Instances

The t3 instances span from nano to 2xlarge. The storage (EBS) price is determined separately by size. The network performance is the same for all as well (up to 5 Gigabit).

You should not evaluate instances like a personal machine. Avoid the “bigger is better” thinking. You only want to pay for the performance you need. So, start small. You can always scale to larger instances or simply add more small ones to handle the workload depending on your use case.

S3 Pricing

S3 pricing is fairly straight forward. There are more storage options within it and you can find that here.

The Standard storage tiers:

Main Features

• general purpose
• quick access
• low cost

AWS Company Details

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