The Navigator's Guide to DigitalOcean
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Navigator's Guide: DigitalOcean, Customer Success, and You

PostedMarch 31, 2018 2.2k views DigitalOcean Articles Solutions

Note: This is an early release version of the contents of the Navigator's Guide book, an offering from the DigitalOcean Solutions Engineers. The goal of the book is to help business customers plan their infrastructure needs, provide working examples along the way, and include technical nuance and the "why" that makes some decisions better than others.

The book and accompanying code will be publicly available in a GitHub repository. Because this is an early release, the book is not yet complete and the repository is not yet public, but stay tuned!

In the introduction, we said that this book would give you the tools and the understanding you need to run a successful infrastructure on DigitalOcean — but what is DigitalOcean, and who are we to tell you what to do?

What Is DigitalOcean?

DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider. Our mission from the start has been to provide an infrastructure experience that development teams love with the features your business needs.

We were founded in 2012, and today we have over 400 employees working out of our headquarters in New York City, our satellite offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Bangalore, India, and remotely across the world.

Because our cloud computing platform was built with simplicity at the forefront, managing infrastructure on DO is easy whether your business is running one virtual machine or ten thousand. Here are some of the products we offer:

  • Droplets are more than just virtual machines. They are a scalable compute platform with free additional features, like Cloud Firewalls, Monitoring, Floating IP Addresses, and DNS zone hosting, that allow you to easily run production applications.
  • Kubernetes is DigitalOcean's native support for the most popular orchestration tool for containerized applications. We'll cover containers and Kubernetes more in other books and resources.
  • Load Balancers automatically distribute incoming traffic across your Droplets, enabling you to build more reliable and performant applications by creating redundancy.
  • Volumes are additional SSD-based block storage devices you can add to your Droplet to suit your database, file storage, application, service, mobile, and backup needs.
  • Spaces is scalable and simple object storage to store, serve, backup, and archive any amount of web content, images, media, and static files for your web applications.

We move fast: we completed all of these features and product launches in the first six years of the company's history, and our product roadmap promises constant iteration and further expansion of features.

You can find detailed information on our products and current pricing on digitalocean.com, and we'll keep this book updated in the future as we expand and improve our product offerings.

Who Are We?

We, the authors, are Fabian Barajas and Jon Schwenn. We're both Solutions Engineers on the Customer Success team at DigitalOcean.

Fabian Barajas joined DigitalOcean in 2015 as a Customer Success Engineer and became a Solutions Engineer in early 2017. He is an LPIC-1 and SUSE Certified Linux Administrator, and holds a number of certifications, including ComTIA Linux+ and A+.

Jon Schwenn has worked in multiple teams at DigitalOcean since 2015. His prior accomplishments include founding a specialty colocation service that hosted thousands of Mac servers, creating and administering a fairly large automotive internet forum, and building an e-commerece system from scratch with ColdFusion in 2001. It was different times back then. Jon is a Red Hat Certified Architect and has been using Linux professionally since 2003.

As a business customer, the Customer Success team is your dedicated resource for help with any platform-related issues. We can solve your problems, answer your questions, or connect you with other people at DigitalOcean who work directly on Product or Engineering.

Our whole team is here to support you: Customer Success Managers are your point of contact for strategic planning and any account concerns, and Customer Success Engineers provide 24x7x365 support through our support system and aim to respond to technical issues within 20 minutes.

We, the Solutions Engineers, help with strategic technical planning discussions, create code examples, and write proof of concept documentation. And sometimes write books.

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Tutorial Series

The Navigator's Guide to DigitalOcean

This is an early release version of the contents of the Navigator's Guide book, an offering from the DigitalOcean Solutions Engineers. The goal of the book is to help business customers plan their infrastructure needs, provide working examples along the way, and include technical nuance and the "why" that makes some decisions better than others.

  • Navigator's Guide: Preface

    March 31, 2018
    How do I scale and grow my infrastructure for my business? More importantly, how do I prevent a crisis? How do I know what my decisions will also impact? Am I asking the right questions? This book will help answer questions, but also help with the background information needed when making decisions that impact your business's infrastructure.

  • Navigator's Guide: DigitalOcean, Customer Success, and You

    March 31, 2018
    In the introduction, we said that this book would give you the tools and the understanding you need to run a successful infrastructure on DigitalOcean — but what is DigitalOcean, and who are we to tell you what to do?

  • Navigator's Guide: Our Solutions for Cloud Computing

    March 31, 2018
    Before we set sail, we want to share a brief infrastructure history lesson. This will help provide context on the needs that cloud infrastructure fills and how to take full advantage of it to get the most value, performance, and stability out of your infrastructure.

  • Navigator's Guide: Initial Environment Setup

    March 31, 2018
    This is the first hands-on portion of the book. First, we'll go over the tools we'll be using, how they fit together, and how they can be beneficial to you as you begin to create and manage your infrastructure on DigitalOcean. Then, we'll set up a single Droplet which we'll use as as a controller to run and use the rest of our tool belt.

  • Navigator's Guide: High Availability

    July 9, 2018
    It doesn't matter if you're running a small blog, a large application, or an API; you never want it to be offline. A single point of failure is any part of your infrastructure that will cause downtime if it fails. A highly available infrastructure has no single point of failure. A highly available configuration is not only important for redundancy. It will also be faster and more cost effective to scale your infrastructure as well.

  • Navigator's Guide: Deployment Solution with Configuration Management

    July 9, 2018
    The previous chapter demonstrated how to reduce downtime by adding redundancy at the web frontend layer of your infrastructure. If your service works with files and data, you'll also need a centralized backend — which should be similarly redundant to avoid being a single point of failure.

  • Navigator's Guide: Modular Infrastructure Configuration

    July 9, 2018
    The previous section used Terraform and Ansible to provision resources (Droplets, Load Balancers, and Floating IPs) and deploy your WordPress application. In this supplemental section, we discuss some ways to simplify this configuration using Terraform modules and separate infrastructure environments. There's no code to execute and no changes to make in this section, but the concepts are important when building a real-world setup.

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