The Cloudcast #264 - The Evolution of Digital Ocean

Aug 19, 2016

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Brian talks with Mitch Wainer (@mitchwainer; Co-Founder of DigitalOcean) and Nick Van Wiggeren (@NickVanWig; Storage Engineering Manager at DigitalOcean) about the overall cloud market, being focused on developers, how to think about geographic coverage and how many features that customers actually ask for.

Show Links:

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DigitalOcean Homepage
DigitalOcean - 2nd Largest Hosting Company in the World (NetCraft)
Block Storage at DigitalOcean

Show Notes:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Give us a little bit of your background, and give us a little bit of the story of DigitalOcean - it’s this success story that not that many people know about.

Topic 2 - “the cloud” is a funny thing in that it can be focus on IT replacement, shadow IT, developers, platforms, etc. - but DigitalOcean has always been focused on developers. What does that really mean?

Topic 3 - A lot of cloud providers are chasing really long lists of “features” or “services”, but the DigitalOcean list is much shorter. Does that tell us more about developers preferring simplicity over features, or does it give us a sense of how ready developers are to use embedded services vs. the DIY mentality?

Topic 4 - Recently you announced a block storage offering. Give us some insight into the service/technology, and background on why it’s being announced now - it would seem like compute + storage was needed on Day 1.

Topic 5 - The Big 3 (AWS, Azure, Google) tend to get the bulk of the media headlines for cloud. Tell us something about your customer base that would surprise us about how developers use DigitalOcean instead of those bigger offerings

Topic 5 - DigitalOcean is a Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) backed company. I know that a number of our listeners read their blogs and listen to their podcasts. What do they bring to DigitalOcean as a VC?

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