[yoda_sl]

Great to see an API improvement for DO! But at the same time, I wish they will provide a few more base features (at a price of course) like an equivalent of S3, EBS and load balancing. With at least those services in place, I will most likely start moving a few apps on DO (yes I know I can use S3 but you get the idea).

[philip1209]

Frankly, S3 is awesome as it is - I would appreciate it if there was direct connect between DO and AWS.

[opendais]

Tbh, given DO's price point, I think EBS would be more support headache than its worth.

Cloudfront & S3 [or equiv] you can already get elsewhere and it doesn't really impact the setup.

DO really, really badly needs highly available, multi-datacenter load balancers. Without highly available load balancing [even in-DC would be good enough] where you can failover the IPs from Load Balancer A to B...

I just don't see it moving outside of the hobby/staging/etc space. Projects that you can afford downtime on.

[JuiceSSH]

If you can survive a few minutes downtime, then you can use Amazon Route53 failover DNS (with health checks) combined with low TTLs to provide failover between DigitalOcean data centres for ~$0.50/month - this is how we structure our less critical APIs that are hosted there.

I agree though - it'd be great if DO provided a proper load balancing solution.

[opendais]

Mhm, I can do DNS load balancing now with any provider.

DO's main competition atm with price parity is Linode which provides single-dc HA load balancers. If I want to pay more I can use AWS, GCP, Azure, etc that also offer them. ;)

I'd really like to avoid DNS load balancing to failover within a datacenter at a minimum [in the event of a load balancer failure], ideally I'd like to avoid it completely.

[nmjohn]

I have a handful of sites that are more than just hobby sites, but the number of 9's in the SLA won't affect the bottom line at all. 5 DO droplets = $25 / month makes significantly more sense in this case than paying over $150 for the equivalent at AWS.

And I think this use is a large enough market for DO to make a fortune.

[bryanlarsen]

Sure, but I'm willing to bet that if DO offered failover, you'd be willing to pay them more to take advantage of it. Perhaps not a lot more, but it's money they're leaving on the table.

I do think that offering IP failover would be a much better way for DO to pick up extra revenue in the future than offering a competitor to S3 or EBS or Cloudfront or whatever.

[opendais]

Fair enough.

I've never worked on that sort of thing so to me downtime == $$ lost. I need a load balancer for anything more than a hobby project as a result. The one thing I can't find anywhere is truly multi-DC load balancers as a service from a hosting provider I'd use.

[netcraft]

I've had the same thought before, but I worry more and more about vendor lock in. I like DO because theyre just giving me a server - I can implement a proxy or a database or whatever on them the same as I would on any VPS. For me to use a service like s3 from DO it would have to have basically the same API as s3 or some other service I could switch to if necessary.

[_delirium]

I agree as far as lock-in goes, but there are some fairly simple "cloudy" things that don't really require lockin. One thing I miss at DO is just being able to set up network-attached storage, e.g. an 100GB drive that I can NFS-mount on a droplet. Instead the only storage available is the instance storage.

[SEJeff]

You might be surprised to know that haproxy or nginx in a container with confd + etcd is actually quite trivial to setup for load balancing:

http://brianketelsen.com/2014/02/25/using-nginx-confd-and-do...