THE DEVELOPER AS CEO
By Ben Uretsky, CEO of DigitalOcean
Software developers are shaping the future. Their ideas are coming to life and enjoying an online distribution at an unprecedented rate. This is made possible by companies who are dedicated to facilitating innovation.
Companies such as GitHub, Stripe, New Relic, Docker, Twilio, etc. are fundamentally changing the way software is built and how developers interact. Their tools and services are pivotal to the success of millions of software developers around the world.
Even larger cloud companies, that traditionally target the CTO with cumbersome feature sets and complex offerings, have started paying more attention to developers. The new Google Cloud Launcher is a recent example; Microsoft’s Azure for Student Developers plan is another. AWS has slashed its prices a few times over the past year. It’s all pointing to one thing: the prominence of developers. They’re choosing which tools are being used at their companies, how the infrastructure is being set up, and ultimately defining the direction of the business.
But at the end of the day, understanding the needs of individual software developers and offering them a fantastic user experience is not their core competency. They are vested in solving the complexities that are inherent in moving the Fortune 500 to the cloud.
That’s why in 2011 we created DigitalOcean — as developers there wasn’t an infrastructure provider that met all our criteria. At the time, you couldn’t easily spin servers up and down on demand, you weren’t sure what your bill was going to be at the end of the month, configuring a server required too many steps, and shared hosting wasn’t cutting it for advanced software developers. Most cloud offerings are still catching up to the idea that simplicity and user-experience are extremely important. DigitalOcean’s advantage is that we’ve focused on servicing developers since inception, building the company from the ground up without ever changing our vision of simplifying innovation.
And we consider ourselves part of a larger community of developers that also share this vision — that’s why we offer leading technologies like Docker and CoreOS on our platform. We love and believe in what they do, and the proof is in the numbers. Docker just raised $95MM in a Series D round for their container platform; CoreOS just launched Tectonic and received a $12MM investment led by Google Ventures. We’ve seen month over month exponential adoption of both technologies on DigitalOcean.
These numbers verify the hypothesis DigitalOcean believed in when it was founded four years ago: that individual software developers will be the key drivers of adoption. There’s a reason the developer segment is seeing the highest IT job growth, and that companies passionate about making things easier for them are flourishing.
To put things in perspective, it took over two years to reach the first million cloud servers [Droplets] launched on DigitalOcean. Fast forward to today, and it took only three months to go from 4MM to the current 5MM servers. We expect that rate to increase to roughly a million servers launched every month for the rest of 2015. Certainly, this is somewhat organic with the growing number of developers coming online; but we’d like to think it also has something to do with DigitalOcean’s product and user-experience.
Developers will continue to come online from around the world and shape what the future looks like: the future of the internet, the future of business, the future of what’s possible. With great companies dedicated to lowering the barrier of entry, the power that once resided solely in the hands of the wealthy or knowledgeable can now be asserted by anyone willing to develop their skills on Code Academy. So when we say our mission is to empower developers, what we mean is we want anyone with the desire to build something impactful to be able to share it with the world.
