Hi! I'd love to hear your feedback about our documentation. I work with the team that produces our tutorials. Are there areas you don't think we cover well, or is it something else? With 1,200+ tutorials, our docs are actually something I'm extremely proud of, but we're always looking to improve.
Your tutorials are awesome and while you may not even see this I would love for someone at DO to get on blob storage.
If that was available I could move a lot of things over ($25k/mo on AWS currently). Load balancers and VPCs are also nice but blob storage is a killer.
Storage and networking are both areas we're investing a lot of work into right now. Blob storage isn't the first on the roadmap on the storage side, but I'll definitely pass on this feedback.
Sometimes you got tutorials from different times (I think one of them is like using Flask with Nginx) - they explain the same problem with two similar solutions but one works and the other one does not (some config parameter change).
IMHO I think you should streamline them and mark the older ones as "OLD" or "ARCHIVED, proceed at own risk".
I've been doing some into to linux/web development workshops at my hackerspace lately, would you guys every be interested in sponsoring one with some DO credits? (Like the first month free or something?).
Also, I have some bad feedback for you (sorry). We ran a workshop last night, and during the workshop, everybody signed up for an account (about 15 people at once). Presumably because we were all connecting from the same place, people started getting "fraud alert" (or whatever you guys were calling it) problems, and had to do additional steps to verify their accounts.
One guy actually had somebody asking for his passport (wat?), and then for links to his social media profiles. That seems EXTREMELY skeezy. It also ground the workshop more-or-less to a halt.
Is there somebody that I can talk to in advance next time so that the same thing doesn't happen again?
Sorry to hear that. That does sound incredibly frustrating. Send me an email at asb@digitalocean.com We can discuss how DO can support your hackerspace, and I can take a deeper look into why you got caught up in our verification process.
There seems to be a bit of confusion about how we handle kernels at DO. Hopefully I can clear things up a bit. On newer distro versions (e.g. Ubuntu >= 15.04, Debian 8, Fedora, CoreOS, FreeBSD) we no longer use "external" kernels. You are free to compile and use custom kernels. We're happy with what we've seen, and with Ubuntu 16.04 around the corner our default distribution will have support for this as well. After that point, we'll be backporting the change to older releases.
For Droplets still running with external kernels, we import new ones on a regular basis as they are released. If you happen to need one that hasn't been imported yet, just open a support ticket and the team will do so.
It's like on any Linux or BSD machine. You can build and install the kernel normally, and it just works.
Only some of the older images still use the old method of selecting the kernel from the Control Panel. The rest that Andrew mentioned use the bootloader and kernel from the droplet's image itself.
Are you planning to offer storage options? I find it's ridiculous to have to upgrade to a higher CPU/RAM plan (or add a new node) just because we're running out of disk space. We don't need detachable volumes or anything fancy, just the ability to increase the amount of disk storage.
Storage is also an area we're working on heavily right now, and we should have some good news soon. We definitely recognize that there's a lot of demand for more storage without the need for the corresponding upgrade in compute power. Check out the update from our product team on this UserVoice request, and vote/subscribe to get updates:
Product manager for Storage at DO here. I generally avoid comment on these kind of things but given the public statements already out there it is safe to say we are launching storage reasonably soon. If you are truly interested in participating in the beta program, email me at tfrietas@digitalocean.com
Hey! Just wanted to give you a quick update on this. We had been in the process of completing a full third-party audit to ensure Safe Harbor compliance. This has been completed, and our status has been update on export.gov:
True; I think it is reasonable project to take on if you are willing to staff developers... if you are trying to build a "bare metal" public cloud, having developers on staff is going to be a prerequisite for quite some time going forward.
Depending on demand, adding other BSD variants is certainly a possibility. We had to start somewhere, and the FreeBSD community has been very vocal about wanting to see this happen. This is the first non-Linux OS we've decided to support, so we're excited to get feedback on it.
Thanks! I'm a long time FreeBSD vps user. It'd be great to check if DO droplets can support CARP failover within the same datacentre, and then expand to be able to do this across datacentres.
RootBSD [1] has been around for quite a while. I personally use fileMEDIA [2] and LunaNode. fileMEDIA provides a set of isos, among which you can find FreeBSD, OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD (i personally requested them the DFBSD one). On LunaNode you can upload any ISO image or qcow2 file you'd like.
We've already put together a lot of basic documentation in-house, [0] but we'd love to expand on what we have in the library. Checkout our "get paid to write" program. [1]
