DigitalOcean is laying off staff

Re:DigitalOcean is laying off staff by ttul on Friday January 17, 2020 @12:30PM (#22076886)

You could also read this as: Digital Ocean raised a $130M credit line and their creditors have noticed that profits aren't what they will need to be in X years time, hence the hair cutting. Their headcount only increased by 4% in the past six months. AWS increased its 10,000+ headcount by 16% in the same time period.

I mean, it's all sheer speculation, but I think it is equally likely that Digital Ocean is having a hard time vs. just restructuring to do some housekeeping... I don't know how any 600 person cloud company survives in the same world as AWS these days.

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Re:DigitalOcean is laying off staff by Matheus28 on Friday January 17, 2020 @12:46PM (#22077087)

> I don't know how any 600 person cloud company survives in the same world as AWS these days.

They aren’t competing in the same space

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Re:DigitalOcean is laying off staff by RussianCow on Friday January 17, 2020 @01:06PM (#22077341)

They most certainly are, especially given the managed products DO has introduced recently (object storage, DB, Kubernetes, and load balancer). They definitely want a slice of Amazon's pie.

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Re:DigitalOcean is laying off staff by Matheus28 on Friday January 17, 2020 @01:16PM (#22077442)

DO is still far from being a “premium” provider. Sure they’re starting to offer a subset of AWS services, but if you compare their prices, they aren’t aiming for the same type of costumers.

Easiest way to compare is bandwidth costs: AWS/Azure/Google Cloud charge around $0.05/GB at their cheapest prices. DigitalOcean/Linode/Vultr charge around $0.005/GB (and it comes with a VPS bundled).

If you’re doing anything bandwidth intensive (several PB a month), one is viable, the other is not

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Re:DigitalOcean is laying off staff by chrisan on Friday January 17, 2020 @12:50PM (#22077141)

> I don't know how any 600 person cloud company survives in the same world as AWS these days.

Having used both daily for years now I can certainly see why DO will have an appeal to some over something as large as AWS.

It is way less confusing and their docs are much easier to get through. I always recommend people starting out with cloud VMs to go DO instead of AWS

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Re:DigitalOcean is laying off staff by jermaustin1 on Friday January 17, 2020 @01:02PM (#22077294)

I agree. If I want to set up something at Digital Ocean, I can know the costs without any complex algebra or a specialized calculator like AWS and Azure have.

Obviously DO has a lot less features than AWS or Azure, but they do add features every couple of years, and their interface is so much simpler to navigate.

I feel DO/Linode/etc are more closely related to a hosted vSphere + f5, than a "cloud provider" in the same vein as AWS/Azure.

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