-- "Serverless Business Unit at DigitalOcean" -- i see a lot of "enterprise lingo" around digital ocean these days - are they still the best "individual developer focused" provider? --
I'd say Yeah. I use and pay for their Apps platform for a few personal projects. Its cheap (like $5/mo/app). It reminds me enough of Heroku that I'm happy. The built-in CI is kind of slow. But it just works and requires relatively low configuration, especially when compared to AWS/GCP/Azure.
There are simpler, more specialized products, but I think DO strikes a really good balance. For example, I've hosted static sites on Cloudflare Pages, which is a solid product, but its also rather unconfigureable; I was running into issues with their built-in CI even using a static site generator which wasn't on their supported list.
Yeah, seems like they changed a lot recently (since they're on NYSE). I feel like they are transitioning away from the "for developers" cloud, to more like a "to be" Heorku or AWS/Azure/GCP cloud.
Welllllllll... don't forget that Linode had grown very stagnant, and had no desire to cut prices, until DigitalOcean came along and forced the issue. Once DO showed up, Linode suddenly had to produce nice tooling and $5/mo VM's.
I don't think that would have happened otherwise, and I'd be really surprised if Linode doesn't follow DO's price increases within a few months.
Not really saying this as a DigitalOcean evangelist or anything. It's just that business is business.
Absolutely agree! Never put a company on a pedestal! But IIRC Linode has had a long history of decreasing prices by adding better specs to existing plans, not sure how that will change with their acquisition. Just keep in mind to build portable apps and avoid lock in.
Serverless has been kinda out of reach of non-enterprise but has a lot of promise for individual developer experience. There's no add'l vendor lock in if you use serverless platforms for typical (mini-)monolith deployments such as django+postgres
There are simpler, more specialized products, but I think DO strikes a really good balance. For example, I've hosted static sites on Cloudflare Pages, which is a solid product, but its also rather unconfigureable; I was running into issues with their built-in CI even using a static site generator which wasn't on their supported list.