DigitalOcean: AI-Native Cloud Platform for Developers

DigitalOcean positions itself around developers building, testing, managing and scaling applications of any size. Its published company story records that DigitalOcean was founded and joined the TechStars Accelerator Program, raised successive funding rounds, and opened data centres including San Francisco, Frankfurt, Canada and Bangalore. Later milestones listed include its IPO, the acquisitions of Nimbella, Cloudways and Paperspace, and launches such as DigitalOcean Kubernetes, Managed Databases and Managed Kafka. The company's main web presence is at digitalocean.com.

• Founded and joined the TechStars Accelerator Program
• Hosted the first-ever Hacktoberfest
• Data centres including San Francisco, Frankfurt, Canada and Bangalore
• IPO, plus Nimbella, Cloudways and Paperspace acquisitions
• Tagline: AI-Native Cloud

The Inference Engine is DigitalOcean's production system for serving AI models at scale, bringing Serverless, Batch and Dedicated Inference together under a single OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible endpoint. The homepage describes serverless inference, intelligent routing and 80+ models with no infrastructure to wrangle, and notes that Kimi K3 is live on Serverless Inference and the Inference Router. Evaluations lets teams benchmark base, fine-tuned, imported models and routing policies on their own data, using six pre-built metrics or custom rubrics, with judge scores shown alongside latency and throughput.

• Inference Router (public preview)
• Serverless, Batch and Dedicated Inference
• Model Playground and Model Library
• Evaluations with correctness, completeness, faithfulness and PII metrics
• Knowledge Bases and vector databases for RAG workflows

Droplets are DigitalOcean's virtual machines, available in Basic, General Purpose, Memory-Optimized and CPU-Optimized configurations, with v5 generation Shared (s5) and General Purpose (g5) plans aimed at high-throughput services, transactional workloads, data pipelines and agentic platforms. Private Droplets, which run without a public IP at the same price, are generally available. GPU Droplets provide virtualised, on-demand GPU capacity for training, fine-tuning, inference and rendering, while Bare Metal GPUs offer isolated hardware without virtualisation for demanding AI training, inference or HPC tasks.

• Droplets starting at $4/mo
• Shared (s5) and General Purpose (g5) v5 Droplets with 2x–8x memory ratios
• GPU Droplets including AMD Instinct MI350X and NVIDIA HGX B300
• Bare Metal NVIDIA HGX H100, HGX H200 and AMD MI300X configurations

App Platform is a fully managed Platform-as-a-Service for building, deploying and scaling web applications, APIs and static sites, supporting deployment from source code, a custom Dockerfile or a pre-built container image. Each service in a monorepo or across repositories can be deployed as a separate component of a single app. DigitalOcean Functions is a serverless offering that runs code on demand and scales automatically, with support for runtimes including Node.js, Python, Go and PHP, and functions can be added as components of an App Platform app.

• Deployment from GitHub and GitLab with automatic HTTPS
• Global CDN, DDoS mitigation and custom domains
• Horizontal scaling and CPU-based autoscaling
• Functions runtimes: Node.js, Python, Go, PHP
• Local development with live preview before deployment

The product documentation groups DigitalOcean's catalogue into compute, databases and AI retrieval, storage, images, networking and monitoring. Storage options include S3-compatible Spaces object storage, Volumes block storage and NFS-based Network File Storage, alongside fully managed database clusters. Networking covers VPCs, traffic filtering and load balancing, while Cloud Security Posture Management runs agentless scans of DigitalOcean resources for misconfigurations, with prioritised findings, guided remediation and suppression governance across free, basic and higher tiers.

• Spaces object storage and Volumes block storage
• Network File Storage
• Managed Databases, Knowledge Bases and vector databases
• VPC networking, cloud firewalls and load balancers
• Uptime monitoring and Identity and Access Management
• Cloud Security Posture Management with agentless scans

DigitalOcean publishes pricing by category covering AI/ML, compute, databases and backups, storage, networking and security, and provides a pricing calculator. Data transfer within and across VPCs in a data centre is free, as is ingress data transfer; public internet egress overage and private VPC egress between data centres are each charged at $0.01 per GiB. Droplets include free outbound data transfer starting at 500 GiB per month, and several services carry no-cost allowances.

• Build and deploy 3 static sites for free
• 90,000 GiB-seconds per month free with DigitalOcean Functions, with no charge for invocations
• Free DNS management and cloud firewalls
• Free container registry with 1 repository and 500 MiB storage
• Free Reserved IPs when assigned to a Droplet

DigitalOcean Documentation covers product features, pricing, availability and limits, use of products from the Control Panel, and account management. The Platform section documents billing, invoices, spend alerts, payment methods, team membership, and CLIs, APIs and SDKs for managing resources programmatically. Technical support can be reached by browsing product topics or opening a ticket in the support portal, and the docs site publishes an index at docs.digitalocean.com/llms.txt for AI agents, with Markdown versions of pages available at matching URLs.

• Product docs, tutorials and pricing pages
• Control Panel guides and account management
• CLIs, APIs and SDKs
• Support portal ticketing
• llms.txt documentation index for AI agents