When DigitialOcean bought Nimbella last year, you knew it planned to dig deeper into serverless technologies, and indeed the company announced a new feature called DigitalOcean Features today, based on Nimbella technology.
Digital Ocean offers cloud infrastructure services at a price lower than the Big 3, making it popular with developers. Gabe Monroy, chief product officer at DigitalOcean, says customers have been pushing for more serverless functionality.
“DigitalOcean acquired Nimbella last year and is really focused on adding serverless and serverless features to our platform. It’s one of the most frequently asked questions from our customers, and I think one of the things that drives this is the great desire of developers to just move straight from code to the cloud without worrying about infrastructure.” , explains Monroy.
Serverless computing allows developers to write programs without having to provide any kind of infrastructure to make it work. The servers are of course still there, but the cloud provider provides all the resources needed to perform the function and no more.
The Functions feature that the company is announcing today gives developers a programming framework to develop its serverless capabilities. Monroy says they’re starting with Jamstack APIs because it’s an easy way for developers to get started programming functions. “Serverless programming can be a bit difficult to get into because the event-driven programming model can be complex,” he said.
“Fortunately, APIs and HTTP use cases are also events. And that makes APIs a really great starting point, because developers don’t have to learn a lot of new programming constructs to be productive with serverless, which is exactly why we started with APIs.”
But Monroy says this isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition where you have to program the entire application with serverless features.” A developer can run a Django application or Ruby on Rails application in containers on our platform, then augment it with function-oriented APIs that run alongside that same application and connect to the same datastores they need.”
One of the things about automated provisioning is that you have to keep an eye on costs, but Monroy says they designed billing with that in mind. “From a pricing perspective, we’ve tried to differentiate ourselves by offering a much simpler pricing model, one that doesn’t include requests or indications as part of the model. So that’s going to be a little easier for people to calculate.”
DigitalOcean Functions is generally available in all regions starting today.
