Limited Availability of DigitalOcean Kubernetes announced!

On Monday, the Kubernetes team announced that DigitalOcean, which was available in Early Access, is now accessible as Limited Availability. DigitalOcean simplifies the container deployment process that accompanies plain Kubernetes and offers Kubernetes container hosting services. Incorporating DigitalOcean’s trademark simplicity and ease of use, they aim to reduce the headache involved in setting up, managing and securing Kubernetes clusters. DigitalOcean incidentally are also the people behind Hacktoberfest which runs all of October in partnership with GitHub to promote open source contribution.

The Early Access availability was well received by users who commented on the simplicity of configuring and provisioning a cluster. They appreciated that deploying and running containerized services consumed hardly any time.

Users also brought to light issues and feedback that was utilized to increase reliability and resolve a number of bugs, thus improving user experience in the limited availability of DigitalOcean Kubernetes.

The team also notes that during early access, they had a limited set of free hardware resources for users to deploy to. This restricted the total number of users they could provide access to. In the Limited Availability phase, the team hopes to open up access to anyone who requests it. That being said, the Limited Availability will be a paid product.

Why should users consider DigitalOcean Kubernetes?

• Each customer has their own Dedicated Managed Cluster. This provides security and isolation for their containerized applications with access to the full Kubernetes API.
• DigitalOcean products provide storage for any amount of data.  
• Cloud Firewalls make it easy to manage network traffic in and out of the Kubernetes cluster. DigitalOcean provides cluster security scanning capabilities to alert users of flaws and vulnerabilities.
• In typical Kubernetes environments; metrics, logs, and events can be lost if nodes are spun down. To help developers learn from the performance of past environments, DigitalOcean stores this information separately from the node indefinitely.
  
  To know more about these features, head over to their official blog page.

Some benefits for users of Limited Availability:

1. Users will be able to provision Droplet workers in many more of regions with full support.
2. To test out their containers in an orchestrated environment, they can start with a single node cluster using a $5/mo Droplet.
3. As they scale their applications, users can add worker pools of various Droplet sizes, attach persistent storage using DigitalOcean Block Storage for $0.10/GB per month, and expose Kubernetes services with a public IP using $10/mo Load Balancers. This is a highly available service designed to protect against application or hardware failures while spreading traffic across available resources.
   
   Looks like users are really excited about this upgrade:

Source: DigitalOcen Blog

Users that have already signed up for Early Access, will receive an email shortly with details about how to get started.
To know more about this news, head over to DigitalOcean’s Blog post.

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