DigitalOcean to splash down Bangalore bit barn

Hosting outfit also working on new cloud storage and monitoring services

DigitalOcean has announced it plans to bring a bit barn to Bangalore, India.

The hosting company has chosen Bangalore as its sixth location, adding to its Amsterdam, Singapore, London, Frankfurt and Toronto facilities.

The idea is to excite local startups, which DigitalOcean reckons will be keen to clamber aboard its cloud. Just why an Indian startup would prefer DigitalOcean's clouds to those of rivals Ganges Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, both of which are also opening in India, is not explained.

DigitalOcean is also “actively working on a robust storage solution” for its customers as part of what co-founder Mousey Uretsky calls “big plans for 2016.” How big are those plans? Big enough that Uretsky says the company is also cooking up “a monitoring solution so developers can track the health of their servers.”

Again, that's nothing rivals can't offer: AWS' CloudWatch will track as many servers as you care to spin up, while the Azure portal offers plenty of performance data, and it's not hard to find third-party tools that promise to deluge you in performance data.

Peering through the ShinyHappy^TM of DigitalOcean's announcement, this looks like the company has realised it needs a broader portfolio to compete, in India or anywhere. To date the company's made a virtue of its services' simplicity. That may be changing as the cloud, and users expectations of it, mature. ®