Startup cloud infrastructure supercharged

When it comes to creating a new super-fast, scalable for growth beautifully designed startup there is question of the cloud infrastructure.

And today there are several options.

1. Amazon cloud infrastructure
2. Rackspace cloud.
3. App-level clouds like Heroku

But one of the simplest and cheapest I think is Digital Ocean. While in some ways Amazon cloud is more reliable the DO is just perfect fits for startups which is not yet so big, or doesn’t need such a reliability like real-time financial transactions.

Key points of the Digital Ocean cloud infrastructure for startups and developers: 1. You sign-up fast and get straight into the cloud & droplets managing console. 2. Droplets is the only units you can manage in DO cloud. Don’t need to think about different other kind of stuff like queues or something else. 3. Droplets are flexible servers (e.g. Ubuntu linux or any other linux distro) which can have any software you like. 4. You can clone your droplets and grow your scalable architecture. 5. The droplets can come with preconfigured software like Ruby On Rails stack for the core of startup or Wordpress for the blog. It’s just that easy - you select what you need on your droplet and get the software ready in seconds. 6. Droplets creation is fast and cheap operation — you pay only 5$ for 1 CPU 2-3Ghz 512MB 20GB SSD storage with 1TB transfer. Isn’t it incredible?

Create your own droplet in Digital Ocean right now for just 5$

Now let’s speak about supercharged part of your cloud infrastructure with DO.

Cloud Supercharged

First, let me speak about how the DO cloud is supercharged with simplicity. While say Rackspace looks sometimes more robust in its multiple set of functions and configurations (e.g. Cloud Servers, Cloud DNS, Cloud anything). I think Rackspace is overcomplicated. In contrast the DO gives your the simplicity your want with great flexibility of Rackspace. I believe Rackspace has it’s own strengths, but DO gets by its simplicity.

Now let’s talk about some advanced stuff built on simplicity.

Digital Ocean introduces a light, but nice addition to its cloud droplets for advanced functionality — the Digital Ocean Projects has a growing list of integrations and apps running on the cloud infrastucture. My favorite one is Commando.io —which allows to manage servers easily online with the most convenient API - the cloud recipes which can be either simple bash script or some advances Ruby script or anything else. Commando.io allows to do a lot of interesting things with all your cloud servers. This projects needs more coverage in a dedicated article.

Here is just a simple idea how you can use commando.io.

I’ve created FREE DISK SPACE recipe to check how much disk space we have across different servers. And here is the sample output (I reduced output for first two servers for simplicity):

This is simple, but so incredible because commando.io allows you to finally have the nice UI for the control of your smart server brain. After exploring it I think you will spend less time in SSH and more in this nice UI.

Don’t miss a chance and register with commando.io for free right now.

This post is just an introduction of what you can do and I will keep it exploring. Stay tuned for the more interesting and beautiful ways of managing your startup cloud infrastructure.