Blocks appear in DigitalOcean's Droplets

Cloud-based virtual servers get attached to blocks

Web compute server hoster DigitalOcean is adding block storage to its cloud-based Droplet servers.

Digital Ocean offers Droplet virtual servers in the cloud for $5/month to $80/month depending on their configuration. The entry-level is 512MB RAM, 1 CPU, 20GB SSD and1TB transfer. At the $80 level you get 8GB, 4 CPUs, an 80GB SSD and 5TB transfer. The Droplets do have local, directly attached storage.

It supports Linux and KVM, and FreeBSD, also CoreOS so customers can run apps on Droplet servers that are deployed in containers. A server can be deployed in 55 seconds and DigitalOcean has eight data centres around the globe – three each in the USA and Europe, one in India and another in Singapore.

The [external] Block Storage is SSD-based and it claims it is incredibly simple to set up. Developers can attach it to their Droplet servers. Ben Uretsky, DigitalOcean co-founder and CEO, has a canned quote: “By adding a highly performant Block Storage offering to our platform, developers can easily deploy and manage their SaaS applications and businesses as they scale. This is one step closer to building the next generation platform.”

Block Storage volumes can scale from 1GB to 16TB and can be resized, and moved between Droplets. All the data is encrypted at rest and transmitted to the Droplets over isolated networks. Data is stored on separate hardware from the Droplet servers and is replicated across many racks to lower the data loss risk if there is a hardware failure.

We haven't been told data can be replicated between separate Digital Ocean data centres but that may be coming.

DigitalOcean says it provides “the second largest and fastest growing cloud computing platform in the total number of public-facing apps and websites, according to Netcraft.“ It has passed the 700,000 registered customer count, and they have launched more than 18 million Droplets in total on DigitalOcean, nearly doubling from 10 million six months ago. We assume AWS is numero uno.

DigitalOcean Block Storage costs $0.10/GB per month for provisioned capacity. It is available now in DigitalOcean’s SF02 data centre in San Francisco. ®