DigitalOcean Dives Deeper into Containers and Kubernetes
DigitalOcean, during an online Deploy by DigitalOcean event, announced today that its DigitalOcean Container Registry service is now generally available.
In addition, the cloud service provider has added a Deploy to DigitalOcean button to the DigitalOcean App Platform, a lightweight platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment the company makes available on top of Kubernetes. The new button automates the deployment of open source code on the DigitalOcean cloud service from a GitHub repository.
Other capabilities added to DigitalOcean App Platform include the ability to transfer existing root domains to DigitalOcean, support for wildcard domains, the ability to configure a static ‘catchall_document’ to optimize performance of Single Page Applications (SPAs) and a Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) mechanism that uses additional HTTP headers to tell a browser to let a web application running at one domain have permission to access selected resources from a server at a different domain. IT teams can now also run a process either before or after the deployment of an application as they best see fit.
Finally, DigitalOcean announced it is adding Storage-Optimized Droplets with NVMe-based solid-state drive (SSD) storage as well as lowering the price for two existing Memory-Optimized Droplets. “Droplets” is the company’s term to describe virtual machine instances.
Raman Sharma, head of product marketing for DigitalOcean, says the company is best known for providing a less expensive alternative for building and deploying applications using its namesake infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform. More recently, however, DigitalOcean has made available both a managed instance of Kubernetes and a PaaS environment that provides developers with a higher level of abstraction for building and deploying container applications.
While there are some development teams who may prefer to build and deploy applications directly on Kubernetes, Sharma says Kubernetes was designed to provide a platform for building other platforms, not deploying code. As such, the DigitalOcean App Platform provides all the benefits of Kubernetes without requiring development teams to master all the underlying intricacies of the open source platform. Over time, Sharma says DigitalOcean expects more development teams will opt for the easier PaaS approach.
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he DigitalOcean Container Registry, meanwhile, is a private registry through which developers can share artifacts. The DigitalOcean Container Registry provides a workflow for connecting the registry to clusters within accounts via a settings tab. The company will then store an authentication token as an imagePullSecret in all namespaces spanning multiple Kubernetes clusters.
Designed to be compatible with the Open Container Initiative (OCI) specification, application development teams can store any artifact, including Helm Charts, that is compatible with the OCI specification. Support for the OCI specification in Helm Charts, however, is still at the experimental phase.
Not every application developed on a cloud is destined to be deployed on that same cloud. Developers for a variety of reasons will make use of multiple clouds to develop applications, not the least of which are cost and simplicity. The easier the application development process becomes, of course, the more applications there are that will eventually be deployed somewhere using best DevOps practices.
