DigitalOcean Partners With CoreOS To Bring Large-Scale Cluster Deployments To Its Platform
Since its launch just a few years ago, DigitalOcean quickly made a name for itself as a hosting platform for affordable virtual servers. The company's ambition goes far beyond hosting your WordPress blog …
Context & Ripple Effects
DigitalOcean entered 2014 with a $37.2 million financing round aimed at challenging AWS, extending an affordable virtual-server pitch toward a broader cloud-platform ambition. CoreOS, meanwhile, had raised a Series A while launching managed Linux as a service, giving it a commercial route for its operating-system approach.
The partnership joins DigitalOcean's infrastructure with CoreOS's cluster-oriented software, making large-scale deployments a capability customers can obtain through the hosting platform rather than assembling solely from individual virtual servers.
First-order effects
- DigitalOcean gains a cluster-deployment offering that broadens its appeal from smaller virtual-server users to teams operating workloads at larger scale.
- CoreOS gains distribution through DigitalOcean's customer base, tying its managed Linux service more directly to a cloud provider's infrastructure.
Second-order effects
- DigitalOcean's competition with AWS shifts beyond low-cost virtual servers: cluster deployment becomes a product-level comparison for customers choosing a cloud host.
- Customers adopting CoreOS on DigitalOcean face a more integrated infrastructure-and-operating-system choice, raising the value of compatibility between the two companies' services.
Third-order effects
- If cloud hosts continue pairing infrastructure with specialized operating layers, differentiation will increasingly rest on how easily customers deploy and manage clusters, not only on the price of individual servers.
- The arrangement points toward a cloud market in which open-source infrastructure vendors reach users through provider partnerships rather than only through standalone software adoption.
The trend: Cloud hosting is moving from selling isolated virtual servers toward packaging the software layers needed to deploy and operate clusters at scale.