DEV Community: Raman Sharma

Contextual Software Development

Raman Sharma — Thu, 30 May 2024 04:32:44 +0000

An average enterprise uses ~40 developer tools, all of which are usually from different vendors. Choosing the best-of-breed tools instead of settling on one giant tightly integrated stack is not a new phenomenon in the developer world.

So, when developers write code, they must consider how that code will interact with all these disparate tools. For an API service, how will the API be consumed in code? What kind of log output would a piece of code produce for a logging service? How does a piece of code represent the corresponding design artifact for a UI component? For a bug fix, how does the change address the problem described in the bug report? And so on.

Gathering this context from different tools—whether to write or review code—has to be one of the more complex tasks in software development. That is why we (Sourcegraph) are bullish on the idea of Contextual Software Development—bringing all of the context, not just from code but from any relevant tools in the stack, right to the place where the developer most needs it.

This additional context not only makes AI smarter but also makes humans smarter by allowing them to visualize their code in terms of what it will actually produce (debugging without a debugger). I would argue that improving humans' comprehension of code (by providing additional context) is even more critical, given that humans will be required to validate tons of AI-produced code for the foreseeable future.

The other key aspect of Contextual Software Development is quickly integrating new context producers (docs, design, PM tools, logs, etc.) and context consumers (Editors, Browsers, CLI, etc.) with minimal work. The only way to enable that is through open standards, thereby opening the doors for anyone to build for and benefit from these additional sources of context.

This is why I am so excited about OpenCtx - it enables contextual software development built on an open protocol.

Use this starter kit to quickly implement Kubernetes

Raman Sharma — Thu, 12 May 2022 21:54:24 +0000

Organizations interested in adopting Kubernetes are often discouraged by its complexity and the time it takes to implement. Kubernetes isn’t easy to understand, and although community support for developers interested in learning about Kubernetes is robust, sifting through the seemingly endless tools and resources available can be overwhelming. DigitalOcean’s starter kit for Kubernetes is designed to help organizations save weeks of learning time in bootstrapping a production-ready cluster using curated, open tools with pre-configured examples.

The software lifecycle in the cloud

When developers discuss the software lifecycle in the cloud, it’s often broken down into Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2 Operations. Day 0 Operations focus on learning about the tool they’re interested in using, while Day 1 and Day 2 Operations is where developers typically begin to configure and deploy applications and focus on operational tasks.

Day 0 Operations for Kubernetes

Day 0 Operations focus on the developers’ understanding of Kubernetes. In this phase, developers will research Kubernetes requirements, explore high-level use cases, and learn best practices for setting up their clusters. There are many resources and tools available through the vibrant Kubernetes community to help developers develop a simple understanding of the basics of the Kubernetes cluster orchestration system.

Day 1 Operations for Kubernetes

Day 1 operations take developers through spinning up a Kubernetes cluster using a managed service and deploying their application. It’s very simple to create a cluster using DigitalOcean—it’s possible to spin up a cluster with just one command. Builders are free to choose how they prefer to create their cluster, often making a choice between a web interface, the command line interface, or terraform. Spinning up the Kubernetes cluster and deploying your application during Day 1 Operations allows you to verify that Kubernetes is a viable choice for your app.

Day 2 Operations for Kubernetes

Day 2 Operations for Kubernetes include the operational tasks like setting up logging, monitoring, ingress, security, backups, and optimization. Day 2 Operations is where developers often get stuck. There’s a significant time commitment to learning and implementing all the details of making a cluster production-ready. By using DigitalOcean’s starter kit for Kubernetes developers can learn through example configurations using step-by-step tutorials. And finally, they can bootstrap their own operations-ready cluster using GitOps (ArgoCD or Flux).

The DigitalOccean Kubernetes Starter Kit

Since Day 2 Operations is where developers most often find themselves stuck or moving slowly, DigitalOcean’s starter kit focuses on simplifying Day 2 operations. The step-by-step guide takes you through important operations like logging and monitoring, ingress, enabling backups, autoscaling, automation, and optimizing your cluster in a way that makes sense for you and your customers.

Logging and monitoring

Without logging and monitoring, it’s difficult to recognize areas of issue within your containers. If you run into a problem and don’t have logging and monitoring in place, you have nothing to troubleshoot and no way of finding out where the issue is.

Logging in relation to Kubernetes allows you to track errors and refine the performance of your containers. Logging is an essential function of Kubernetes management, and there are many open source strategies for cluster-level monitoring and logging. The starter kit uses Loki for logging, using promtail to send worker nodes and application logs to Loki, Grafana for visualizing and analyzing logs, and DigitalOcean block storage, or Spaces, for logs.

Monitoring allows for easier management of Kubernetes clusters through detailed reporting of memory, CPU usage, and storage. Using Kube-prom-stack, organizations can monitor the DigitalOcean control plane, nodes, and applications and receive metrics data stored in DigitalOcean block storage. Developers can also configure alertmanager to deliver important notifications through slack or email.

Ingress

In many cases, developers start with the load balancer available to them through their cloud provider. Adding one load balancer for every service can get expensive. To avoid using one Load Balancer per service, developers need a proxy inside the cluster. That’s Ingress. Ingress helps route incoming traffic to appropriate backend services. Nginx is a popular Ingress Controller and is covered in detail. For developers who need an API gateway, Ambassador is provided through the starter kit. Using Ambassador as the API gateway provides benefits such as automatic certificate management, authentication, and API publishing.

Backups

Creating backups is an absolutely critical best practice for Kubernetes management. With Velero, developers are able to back up the cluster and application configuration and data, schedule backups with pre and post hooks, and restore in the event of a disaster or when migrating over to another cluster in the same or even a different cloud. The starter kit provides step-by-step tutorials on two of the most popular backup solutions, Velero and Triliovault, and developers can choose which one best suits their needs.

Auto-scaling

Kubernetes provides several resources that allow developers to run multiple instances of an application and create high availability configurations, but there’s still a level of uncertainty around the amount of CPU needed at any given time. Developers will often set up cluster management based on monitoring application response to load over time, but this requires manually adjusting the values and manually making changes if applications misbehave. This also doesn’t account for a load decrease, wasting resources such as CPU and RAM when applications don’t automatically scale down.

With the HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA), a dedicated controller automatically changes the replica set value for your application deployments. Based on the load, the HorizontalPodAutoscaler will automatically scale your deployments up or down.

Automation

GitOps is an operational approach for platform engineers and software developers where every aspect of a project’s infrastructure, including infrastructure as code files, configuration files, and application code files, are stored in git repositories. GitOps keeps your system state synchronized with a Git repository and works with infrastructure that can be observed and described declaratively (like Kubernetes, for example). ****When a git commit is pushed to source control, it triggers a change that updates the cloud infrastructure or application. With continuous delivery, GitOps tools like Flux CD or Argo CD fetch current configuration from the Git repository and apply required changes to your Kubernetes cluster to maintain the desired state.

When adopting GitOps, the cluster state is stored in Git. This has sensitive configuration data like secrets. Hence, sensitive configuration data should not be kept in a Git repo in clear text. The sealed secrets controller is used to encrypt the secrets outside the cluster. The step-by-step tutorials include the sealed secrets controller as part of the GitOps chapter.

Try it today

Spin up a DigitalOcean Kubernetes cluster today and test the starter kit for yourself! For those looking for more of a UI experience, you can use equivalent DigitalOcean Kubernetes 1-clicks. Those are maintained at par with the starter kit.

Try today for free

Latest products and features at DigitalOcean: April 2022

Raman Sharma — Tue, 10 May 2022 20:49:25 +0000

DigitalOcean’s product team has been working hard in April to bring developers new features and capabilities. Find out the latest news, including improvements for PaaS, DBaaS, Developer Solutions, and more, and learn about the new SaaS Add-Ons from the DigitalOcean Marketplace, now available on-demand and with generous free plans to get you started.

DigitalOcean App Platform (PaaS)

App Platform can now auto-detect multiple resources for new apps

When you create a new App Platform app you can now add new resources, in addition to already being able to add resources to an existing app. Resources are deployable runtime software elements like a database, service, worker, or static site.

Python Buildpack 3.10.4

We updated the default version of Python in the Python Buildpack from 3.9.9 to 3.10.4. For more information and configuration options, see the Python Dev Guide.

Hugo Buildpack 0.94.2

We updated the default version of Hugo in the Hugo Buildpack from 0.82.0 to 0.94.2. You can override the default version with an environment variable. For more information and configuration options, see Buildpack’s docs.

DigitalOcean Droplets (IaaS)

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS now available

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (ubuntu-22-04-x64) base image is now available in the control panel and via the API.

FreeBSD Droplets are being deprecated 1st of July 2022

To focus on our most used distributions we’re ending support for new FreeBSD Droplets. You will no longer be able to create new FreeBSD-based Droplets through the cloud control panel on the 1st of June 2022.

FreeBSD Droplets created from the 3rd of May to the 1st of July 2022 will continue to work despite these changes. Only legacy FreeBSD Droplets will remain on the platform.

You can create Droplets using FreeBSD after the 1st of July using DigitalOcean’s custom images feature to import a virtual disk image of FreeBSD OS.

DigitalOcean Load Balancer (LBaaS)

UDP support for time-sensitive transmission

For applications that require more time-sensitive transmission, such as live broadcasts. We have started rolling out UDP support for DigitalOcean Load Balancers. This includes UDP support for DigitalOcean Kubernetes Load Balancers.

DigitalOcean Managed Databases (DBaaS)

Managed MongoDB now with Dedicated CPU

DigitalOcean Managed MongoDB now has a dedicated CPU with your choice of General Purpose and Storage Optimized so you can better fit your business needs.

DigitalOcean Developer Solutions

Updated API Tokens with new management features

Take advantage of the new DigitalOcean API Tokens that have many new features like GitHub secret scanning, prefixed tokens, last used at, and expiring tokens. Generate a new API token and revoke old tokens to make sure you can use the new features.

Try SaaS Add-Ons today!

We’re thrilled to offer SaaS solutions as Add-Ons that run in the cloud and are available on demand. Add-Ons are offered by innovative software providers that apply to the DigitalOcean Marketplace. Read the blog or see Chris Sev’s demo in a couple of minutes.

The following are a few Add-Ons you will enjoy:

Monitoring

Backups

SnapShooter Add-On

Business Ops

Helpy Pro Add-On

Log management

Automation and DevOps

WayScript Add-On

Performance

MemCachier Add-On

Data

Bit.io Add-on

Security

Apple Pay is now available

We are now accepting Apple Pay! You can use this payment method for DigitalOcean on Safari and logged into Apple Pay.

Connect with us

Do you have an idea for improving our products? Submit your feedback and vote on other user suggestions on our ideas page. If you have questions, ask them here.

Happy coding!

Announcing general availability of Add-Ons on the DigitalOcean Marketplace

Raman Sharma — Mon, 02 May 2022 03:25:27 +0000

In 2019, we launched the DigitalOcean Marketplace, so that builders can quickly install common software packages on DigitalOcean Droplets while giving them the flexibility to perform their own software maintenance and management. We called these solutions Droplet 1-Click Apps, and later added Kubernetes 1-Click Apps to reduce the complexity of deploying software packages to clusters. The 200+ DigitalOcean Marketplace 1-Click Apps are for users that want to spin up quickly and manage their software. Now, we’re thrilled to offer SaaS solutions via the DigitalOcean Marketplace as Add-Ons that run in the cloud and are available on demand. These Add-Ons are offered by innovative software providers that apply to the DigitalOcean Marketplace and enable anyone to get the benefit of SaaS apps quickly and easily.

How builders benefit from Add-Ons

Add-Ons quickly add new capabilities to your Droplets, Kubernetes clusters, apps, or business operations. Unlike 1-Click Apps that allow for a higher level of installation and configuration control, developers choose Add-Ons when they don’t want to install and manage software.

By using Add-Ons offered through the DigitalOcean Marketplace, developers get easier account management, transparent pricing, provider-managed security, and maintenance. Add-Ons improve the developer experience and give small businesses and startups the solutions they need to keep growing. Add-Ons integrate simply and quickly through an API key, or via a checkbox on the Droplet Create page.

“So much engineering work is created when teams need to support 3rd party software, especially if it’s not core to their solution. That’s why we are excited to offer WayScript as an Add-On to the DigitalOcean Marketplace: developers can spin up and down an endless number of software solutions that grow with the company’s needs without worrying about the maintenance.” Jesse Orshan, CEO of WayScript

Near zero management and maintenance

Because Add-Ons are SaaS solutions, they require little administration as compared to most software that runs directly on Kubernetes clusters, Droplets, or containers. Since Add-Ons are delivered on-demand via software providers in the DigitalOcean Marketplace, teams can add new functionality fast, without adding technical debt or consuming valuable engineering team capacity.

Simplify account management

Typically, developers have to create a new account for each SaaS solution they want to add to their application. This means spending time on account management and managing multiple invoices. Add-Ons allow builders to automatically have an account provisioned with their chosen SaaS provider, have a seamless and secure login to the SaaS provider’s dashboard, and get centralized billing through DigitalOcean.

Simplify pricing

Software providers offer free and paid plans for their Add-Ons in the DigitalOcean Marketplace. Plan details and pricing information are shown on each Add-On listing page, and give developers the information they need to determine if an Add-On will meet their needs.

See the Add-Ons in action

In the following video, Chris Sevilleja explains how Add-Ons work, and puts a couple into action in just a few minutes!

Try Add-Ons today

We’re delighted to launch a handpicked set of Add-Ons built by software providers like Plesk, SolarWinds, SnapShooter, and Better Stack that serve a variety of popular use cases for builders.

For years, Plesk and the WebPros Group have partnered with DigitalOcean, with thousands of shared customers using both the Plesk and cPanel 1-Click Apps.

“We’re glad to double down again on our successful partnership and look forward to helping builders on DigitalOcean improve their uptime and service offerings through better server and website monitoring with our 360 Monitoring Add-On.” - Lucas Radke, Product Manager at Plesk

Monitoring

Plesk’s 360 Monitoring Add-On ****empowers you to monitor any website or server, track performance, and prevent downtime with configurable dashboards, easy set-up, and custom tools.

Better Stack offers two useful Add-Ons, Logtail and Better Uptime. The Better Uptime Add-On is a monitoring platform that calls your phone if anything goes wrong. Schedule on-call duties, receive helpful alerts, and collaborate on solving incidents faster than ever. A branded status page on your domain keeps your users informed, with over 100+ integrations.

Status List Add-On combines uptime, performance monitoring, and a built-in status page in one service. They monitor your web service and tell you when your service is down or running extremely slow. All your monitors and their statuses are on a single page. And you can deflect customers to your Status List hosted status page during an outage.

Backups

You can get hourly to daily backups of Droplets, volumes, databases, and applications with the SnapShooter Add-On. Over 5.6M+ snapshots and 200+ petabytes have been managed for DigitalOcean customers using SnapShooter already.

Business Ops

Helpy Pro Add-On is a turnkey ticketing and customer support platform, and is perfect for quickly adding helpdesk functionality to your project on DigitalOcean!

Log management

SolarWinds offers *the *Papertrail Add-On, a log management solution capable of installing in seconds to provide instant log visibility. It includes full-text search and the ability to view, pause, and search live event data, share, reuse, and alert on popular searches to catch issues early and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Better Stack, who we mentioned earlier, also provides the Logtail Add-On, which lets you query your logs the same way you query a database. You can store your logs in a structured format and search them easily with SQL, create actionable dashboards with hosted Grafana, archive log fragments, collaborate with colleagues, get automatic anomaly detection alerts, and more.

Automation and DevOps

The WayScript Add-On is an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) that enables builders to spin up customizable development environments in a single click which integrate Docker, Kubernetes, and all your third-party dev tooling (GitHub, Datadog, PagerDuty, Jenkins, CircleCI, Auth0, etc.). Builders use it daily to quickly build REST APIs, cron jobs, data pipelines, internal tools, and other automation. WayScript is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, and you can use WayScript through your desktop, browser, or self-host your own air-gapped version.

Performance

If you need to increase the performance of your data layer, consider using the MemCachier Add-On. This ****reliable and powerful memcache-as-a-service allows for faster access to your data.

Data

The Bit.io Add-on provides Postgres with modern import, query, and share features. You can auto-import data with a simple drag and drop, query without installing tools, and share as fast as Github. Become productive with data in 5 seconds, not 5 weeks.

Security

Implement cloud governance, fix identity and access issues, and secure your container workloads using the Cloudanix Add-On. Cloudanix provides monitoring and remediation tools across AWS, Azure, GCP, DigitalOcean, and Kubernetes.

The SOOS Add-On is software security for everyone, providing an easy-to-integrate software security solution for your whole team. Build, catch, and fix vulnerabilities with composition analysis, or find vulnerabilities by scanning a web application or APIs with SOOS DAST.

Submit your Add-On to the Marketplace

As our community grows each day, so does our list of Add-Ons from open source projects, enterprises, and startups. If you or your team offers Software-as-a-Service solutions, wants to generate a new revenue stream, and is excited to reach 600,000+ passionate builders across the world, then DigitalOcean Marketplace is an ideal fit for you.

Visit the DigitalOcean Marketplace Vendor Page for information and to register today.

Happy Coding,

Let us build a community of folks who build developer tools

Raman Sharma — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 05:30:04 +0000

I want to build a community of DevTools builders.

Why?

(1) Because developer tools are a special kind of software

Good developer tools help software developers build better software faster
Incremental quality and productivity improvements in software development have ripple effects on all aspects of the global economy (“Software is eating the world” and all that..)

(2) Because I think DevTools builders are a special breed

They care as much about the “art of software development” as the software itself. That is why they build tools to improve their own lives and those of fellow developers.
They are finally getting both acclaim and commercial success. I wrote about this in my article - Developing for Developers — Path to Fame, Money, and Happiness

(3) Because I am passionate about this space

I have been associated with developer tools my entire career - first as a user early in my career as a developer; then as a PM working on compilers, libraries, IDE, etc.; and now marketing developer tools and cloud infrastructure services to development teams.
Most of the writing I have done here has been related to this topic. Some around marketing, e.g., Twilio - Intentionally Clever or Accidentally Genius? and some around technology, e.g., Multiple Stops on the Cloud Compute Continuum — All With Their Own Merits

What would this community look like?

I honestly don’t know.

However, I am hoping I will figure it out. I have been conflicted on this whole topic of “community” as I ranted in this piece - What does community mean in Tech?

So, I thought it would be an interesting experiment to figure out this whole “building a community” thing if I did it in the context of a topic I am passionate about - developer tools. Especially because I don’t believe there is a great place for DevTools builders to come together and engage on the topic of building DevTools (I could be wrong, but I haven’t found anything)

Here are some ideas I am exploring but would welcome other thoughts:

Reddit: I went ahead and created /r/devtoolsbuilders. So far, nothing major there, but hoping it will pick up.
Potentially some other avenue for discussions. I hear mixed opinions about Discord. What else is there?
DevTools builder interviews: I haven’t decided whether this would be like a podcast series, video interviews on YouTube, or just written articles.
Dedicate more of my writing here and elsewhere to this topic

I want to make this community vendor-agnostic and have it focused on the issues of the “What, Why, and How” of building developer tools. I use the term “building” rather loosely here to include all required aspects, from conceptualizing the ideas to getting these tools into the hands of the intended users. So developers, designers, PMs, writers, marketers, etc., are all welcome to join.

Please help me spread the word.

DigitalOcean Kubernetes Challenge

Raman Sharma — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 09:18:59 +0000

Looking to experiment with something new in Kubernetes? Join us for the DigitalOcean Kubernetes Challenge!

Whether you’re new to Kubernetes, or you have been running production clusters for years, this challenge will give you an opportunity to level up your Kubernetes skill-set before the end of the year. Pick a challenge, apply for DigitalOcean credits, and get hacking! Completed projects will earn you a cool set of prizes. Projects are due December 31, 2021.

Deploy CockroachDB in a managed DigitalOcean Kubernetes Cluster

Raman Sharma — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 08:25:45 +0000

For the DigitalOcean Kubernetes Challenge, I wanted to deploy a database to a managed Kubernetes cluster, and decided to go with CockroachDB Core.

The process to deploy on Kubernetes was simple. I just followed the instructions in CockroachDB official documentation, with just one change - In "Step 1. Start Kubernetes", instead of using hosted GKE or EKS (as mentioned in the docs), I used DigitalOcean's Managed Kubernetes service.

So my "Step 1. Start Kubernetes" was basically:

How to Create Kubernetes Clusters Using the Control Panel from DigitalOcean. I created a 3 node cluster with s-4vcpu-8gb droplets. You should be able to do it with slightly smaller droplets too.

Rest of the steps were as mentioned in the doc:

What does Community mean in Tech?

Raman Sharma — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 18:57:08 +0000

I don't think any other industry uses the word community as liberally and, unfortunately, as loosely as the tech industry does. Different entities use this term differently and make it as broad or narrow as possible depending on their interpretation or interests.

At this stage of the argument, I would usually include a dictionary definition of the term to create a baseline and then demonstrate how far we have deviated from the baseline. However, the truth is that all of the above-mentioned loose usages of the word will probably fit some version of the definition. That still doesn't mean that the term isn't abused.

There are times when people (in business) say things like "the community expects us to....". At such times, I am a little confused about which community is being referred to:

1) "The X community" where X is a business or organization or product, e.g., "The iPhone user community" or "The Peloton community". Popular products tend to have strong and loyal communities around them. These are people who write articles about these products, jump onto online forums to help other users out with problems, defend these products when compared to competitive products, etc. It is not uncommon for businesses to themselves create these avenues for engagement. However, in such cases, these are just one-to-many channels (for support or information dissemination) that companies operate publicly to "answer once, solve many". This is an interesting take:

Ryan Hoover

@rrhoover

People often conflate community with audience. A key distinction:

Audiences are one-to-many

Communities are many-to-many

22:11 PM - 30 Jan 2021

2) "The Y community" where Y is an interest, trend, profession, skill, technology, etc., e.g., "The JavaScript developer community" or "The medical community" or "The crypto community". In the technology industry, this is the most remarkable kind of community that invariably springs up around a common interest area just in support of the idea and to help others learn and grow. I love this video that describes how the internet has turbocharged this category of the community (this is before social media):

However, even here, businesses can plant themselves opportunistically. If a trend is popular, companies want to leverage it to advance their interests. Putting a lot of helpful content out on the internet that touches upon ideas, concepts, problems, solutions, etc., that are relevant to your products can help bring potential customers to your doorstep (or at least leave an impression of you as a helpful brand). In this case, instead of calling it "The Tuft and Needle Community", they will quite deliberately call it "The mattress enthusiast community". It just sounds more altruistic. And there is nothing wrong with it. If you have solved a genuine "sleep posture" problem for an online reader through an interesting article, then you have legitimately earned the right to at least request them to come to your site and take a look at your mattress catalog. This is also called content marketing btw!

On this note, for all the flak that StackOverflow gets about being unfriendly, there is no arguing that it does provide value to people in "The Developer community" looking for specific information.

3) "The Z community" where Z is a location - neighborhood, city, state, country, continent, the entire globe (but mostly limited to humans), e.g., "The Bronx community" or "The North Bend community"

Similarly, it could be any number of combinations of socioeconomic characteristics, proximity to certain individuals in a business, personal passions of people, and so on.

However, I wonder whether a person even identifies as a part of the said community in many cases. Anyway, in this post, to simplify things, I will go along with the accepted usage of the term, which is "the community".

Since we are talking about "the community" that people in business talk about, let us dissect it a little bit more. It would not be too far-fetched to argue that every business engages with "the community" with a business goal in mind (for the most part). Even this concept becomes a point of contention sometimes - different parts of the business have differing opinions around whether a particular business activity is community-oriented or not.

There are axes along which people define who is in "the community" and who isn't. And if a particular action doesn't benefit their preferred side of the axis, the gatekeepers deem it not community-oriented. Examples:

Based on engagement: Customers who pay money, users who use products (yes, this can be a different group from paying customers), people who write comments on online forums, people who read documentation are all sometimes (but not unanimously) considered a part of "the community". Others are not.
Based on interest/occupation: Some say that to be a part of "the community", it is not required to engage with anything that a business puts out. Just being in the same industry or having similar interests qualifies someone to be a part of it. Business textbooks would describe these entities as competition, partners, or target markets. To each their own.
Based on size: Another common argument is that individual users (people engaging with a business or a product in their personal capacity) are a part of "the community" but business users (who buy for business use) are not. Beats me!
Based on economic exchange: According to another school of thought, anyone a business engages with, in a profit-making capacity, is not in "the community". However, anyone who is a beneficiary of the charitable deeds of a company is a part of the community.

I am not arguing that any of these definitions OR even any of these ways of thinking are wrong. I guess I have just joined the community of people confused about which community they are in.

Join us for deploy, DigitalOcean's virtual conference

Raman Sharma — Thu, 28 Oct 2021 05:49:58 +0000

Calling all developers! DigitalOcean is preparing for another deploy conference, the virtual event for global development teams. Join us on November 16th and 17th, as technical experts from DigitalOcean share practical takeaways on using cloud technologies to grow your business. With a focus on cloud native applications, you'll walk away with Kubernetes starter kits, time-saving security tips, and robust tooling setups to build your software with ease.

Cloud native applications — apps that are built and run to take full advantage of all the benefits that cloud computing offers — have risen in popularity in recent years because they’re easier to scale, allowing builders to quickly and efficiently launch, support, and grow their businesses. This November, we’ll focus on how builders can accelerate the development of cloud native apps, especially among startups and small-to-medium-sized businesses.

Best practices and business growth: sessions for all builders

We’ll kick things off with a message from DigitalOcean’s CEO, Yancey Spruill, where he will share his thoughts on all the product enhancements we’ve made this year and highlight some customers who have built robust and scalable businesses on DigitalOcean. His keynote will be followed by presentations from engineers, customers, and other experts that are building technologies and businesses powered by the cloud.

Through keynotes and product demos, you’ll get the tools you need to find success with cloud services. We’ll cover a variety of topics including setting up Kubernetes clusters to best practices for critical operations like logging, security monitoring, backup, and more. You’ll hear real stories from other builders, sharing their startup journeys and how scrappy developer teams are using DigitalOcean to meet their business goals. And you’ll learn how you can build your business more efficiently with managed cloud services.

deploy runs November 16th and 17th, with a four-hour conference block on each day. Use the full agenda to plan your day and star your favorite sessions to create a custom viewing schedule.

Content and community: get involved with other developers

Event attendees will have another opportunity to connect, converse, and collaborate with developers around the world in the deploy Discord server. Chat in real-time with attendees, speakers, and DigitalOcean executives to get insight on any of your business challenges. On conference day, we’ll open up additional rooms where you can play games and video network with other conference attendees.

We’re thrilled to be a part of this amazing community and can’t wait to connect with everyone at the event!

RSVP Here

DigitalOcean deploy conference - June 2021 - All product sessions

Raman Sharma — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 07:49:32 +0000

Some of my favorite sessions from the recently concluded deploy conference by DigitalOcean:

Opening Keynote With DigitalOcean CEO Yancey Spruill

Accelerating Modern App Development Using Managed MongoDB and DigitalOcean

Is Kubernetes Right for Me? Choosing the Best Deployment Platform for Your Business

Be the Boss of Your Base: Tips to Master MongoDB Like a Pro

Finding the Right DigitalOcean Virtual Machine Type for Your Business

Grow Your Business with Scalable Apps Using DigitalOcean App Platform

Building Production-Ready Apps With App Platform, DigitalOcean's Reimagined PaaS

Networking Best Practices To Power Your Kubernetes Deployment

Kubernetes Starter Kit for Developers: Becoming Productive From Day 1

Join us today for deploy - DigitalOcean’s virtual conference

Raman Sharma — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 07:37:45 +0000

It is not too late to join us for our signature event - deploy. This edition of deploy is focused on helping small businesses and startups scale on the cloud:

deploy, Power Your Business
Register now

From products to pitches: Content that speaks to all builders

Kicking off the event, DigitalOcean’s CEO, Yancey Spruill will talk about where we're headed as a company and also share some exciting product updates. His keynote will be followed by presentations from community members, engineers, customers, and other experts that are building technologies and businesses powered by the cloud.

The content spans a wide breadth of topics relevant to anyone who is a builder - whether you are building a simple app, a business, or a body of knowledge. From learning how to scale your applications to understanding the complex world of fundraising with Techstars, this event covers all aspects of setting up and scaling your apps and businesses.

Come for the resources, stay for the real connections

With live Q&A and an active Discord server that connects speakers and attendees one on one, there’s ample opportunity to engage and learn something new.

Ask your burning tech questions to speakers in the breakout groups.
Take a break and enjoy some live entertainment in the off-topic channels.
Snap selfies in the deploy photo booth.
Network with fellow attendees in the #introductions channel.
Follow the event on social and tag your experience with #DOdeploy.

Members of our team will be available throughout the event. Everyone is invited, from executive staff and engineers to product builders and content creators.

We’re so honored to have such an incredible community and we can’t wait to connect with each and every one of you at deploy. The time and details are below:

Date: June 29th, 2021 @ 9 am ET
RSVP HERE
#DOdeploy

We look forward to seeing you there!

Multi-Cloud makes sense but not for the reasons you think

Raman Sharma — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 20:41:08 +0000

What is multi-cloud really?

In the technology world, the definition of multi-cloud is usually - choosing more than one cloud provider from among the usual suspects (AWS, Azure, GCP etc.) to build your IT infrastructure. And the reasons given for choosing a multi-cloud setup are various - risk management, avoiding lock-in and reliance on one provider, compliance with regulatory requirements etc. This recommendation usually comes from cloud providers who want to make inroads into each other's customer base, and from service providers and IT consulting firms who have lots to gain from companies creating complex infrastructure setups involving multiple clouds and their unique concepts.

Does it add value?

It is debatable whether a business really benefits from such multi-cloud setups. Both from the perspective of standardization as well as affordability, one can argue that large enterprises are better off staying with one cloud:

Central standardization is important to large enterprises. However, it is harder to standardize internally when there are multiple cloud providers in play.
Large enterprises are not very cost sensitive. So the minuscule differences in costs for individual products from large cloud providers don't justify the additional complexity.

Regardless, multi-cloud is a popular topic among large enterprise IT decision makers. The hype has worked.

How do startups and smaller tech companies approach multi-cloud?

In my experience, smaller companies tend to be much more pragmatic practitioners of multi-cloud. However, the specific multi-cloud aspect of their apps and infrastructure is not what usually gets talked about in popular tech literature. Most smaller companies adopt multi-cloud architectures almost by necessity. They have two needs:

They want to focus on building their apps and not reinvent the wheel
They want tools and services that are best of breed in their respective areas, in terms of productivity and ROI

In fact, tech startups and small development teams are increasingly picking some combination of the below services:

compute from a infra-provider like AWS/GCP/Azure/DigitalOcean,
payment services from Stripe,
communication services from Twilio,
auth services from Auth0,
Atlas from MongoDB,
CDN / security services from Cloudflare,
etc

When they do this, "Adopting a Multi-Cloud strategy" is not really the thing they have in mind. They are merely looking to compose their apps together using the best tools in the market. They are trying to get to their desired results faster and in an economically viable manner. However, what they do is essentially what a good Multi-Cloud setup looks like. In many cases, they don’t really care where these different “component service” providers build their services. Any concern around the manageability of these multiple providers, is also much smaller than the alternatives - building this functionality yourself or using an inferior alternative from someone who is focused on much more horizontal problems.

Will this trend continue?

An argument can be made that if you go with a large cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP etc.), all your needs can be met within one provider. They have both infrastructure (IaaS) as well as managed (PaaS) services for every building block needed by application developers. However, the reality is that modern app builders are not only choosing lighter weight specialized tools for the job but actively experimenting with non-mega-providers. This is spurring on smaller providers to continue to identify and service specialized use case scenarios and underserved audiences through hyper-focused solutions. Composing apps using best-of-breed services coming from experts in their respective areas, is a trend that will continue to grow, and we all will benefit from it.