DigitalOcean Opens New Data Center in London, Its Fifth With More to Come
DigitalOcean opened a new data center in London today — it’s fifth internationally as a hosting provider for the worldwide developer community. There are more than 20 million developers in the world, said Mitch Wainer, co-founder and chief marketing officer for DigitalOcean. The company serves 120,000 of those developers, leaving lots of runway as the overall market grows to more than 26 million developers by 2019.
Amazon Web Services is the clear runaway leader in the space, so far ahead that Gartner Research had to do a custom design of its Magic Quadrant to reflect AWS overall lead.
But DigitalOcean’s growth is noteworthy in itself. In March, TechCrunch Writer Fredric Lardinois wrote a profile of the company and how it went from its three-person founding team to 50 employees. It now has 90 employees with the largest growth in its operations and engineering team, Wainer said yesterday in a phone interview. Six month ago the team had 5 people. Now it has 20. By this time next year, the company will have 60 to 75 more people on the team.
With London now online, DigitalOcean has data centers in the New York metropolitan region, San Francisco, Amsterdam and Singapore, which opened earlier this year, Wainer said. Plans are to open new data centers in Canada, Australia and South America.
The growth is largely possible due to a $37 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz earlier this year. With that investment, DigitalOcean has the cash to leverage large credit lines and expand globally.
The new data center will be all IPv6 just as with the Singapore data center. It will also run version 1.5 of its backend code base, which also runs the Singapore infrastructure.
According to DigitalOcean, with IPv6, a Droplet ( a virtual server) does not have to be tuned off when initiating tasks such as snapshots and enabling/disabling networking services. It also helps with an overall more reliable backup service architecture. IPv4 is still widely used but addresses are running out as Internet ready devices proliferate.
IPv6 allows for more address space by using a 128-bit address. The transition to IPv6 is not an easy one as the two protocols are not designed to be interoperable, complicating the transition to IPv6.
The DigitalOcean service starts at $5 per month. Droplets come with 512MB of RAM and a 20GB of SSD-powered hard disk space.
Why London? The developer community there is enjoying a renaissance and there have been lots of requests for the service. There are also the data privacy laws which restricts certain data from leaving the UK. The new data center provides a “native” service for developers.
DigitalOcean has had its growing pains, for example, when it was using two different images for small and large servers, Luridness writes. But it has settled that issue consolidating to one image size.
So for Digital Ocean, the next step in its evolution will come with how it extends its services to offer a greater variety of Droplets. For example, that might include a Docker Droplet that Digital Ocean packages with its service.
“We are going through this interesting evolution of the business,” Wainer said. “You will see DigitalOcean start to cater to a broader audience of developers over the next 6 to 12 months.”
DigitalOcean is a sponsor of The New Stack.
Feature image via Flickr Creative Commons.
