Just 10 years ago, the common way to manage your infrastructure for many enterprises and large organizations was to do it themselves – something referred to as “on prem,” for on premises.
As you can imagine, there are a lot of headaches that come along with managing your infrastructure this way. You need to have someone on call all the time incase something goes wrong. If a piece of hardware breaks, you either need to keep backups on hand or order them and hope they come quickly.
And you may be at the mercy of certain events, like the iOS update from 2013 that took down college networks across the US.
Luckily in 2022, there’s a better way: hyperscalers.
In this Episode: How Hyperscalers Offer Great Reliability
Darian Wilkin, Senior Solutions Engineer at Digital Ocean, describes Digital Ocean as AWS, “give or take $160 Million.” And while this is a tongue-in-cheek way of saying they offer the same thing, but AWS is much much bigger, it also plays to Digital Ocean’s strength.
See, if you’ve ever experienced streaming issues with HBO or the Super Bowl, it’s likely due to the sheer amount of traffic crushing the infrastructure. And while HBO and NBC have the staff and the wallets to make AWS work for them, most SMBs don’t.
That’s where Digital Ocean comes in. They want to bring the reliability, availability, and redundancy of hyperscalers to SMBs so they can focus on running their business, and not on becoming an infrastructure expert.
Key Takeaways
- Hyperscalers are cloud-based infrastructure that can easily and quickly scale-up in response to heavy traffic.
- Digital Ocean offers infrastructure as a service (IaaS), meaning that SMBs don’t need to keep and maintain their own servers, or understand hyperscalers at all.
- When we talk about scaling up, we’re talking about computability. The example used in the episode is if a group of students on a college campus all decide to start mining Bitcoin. A hyperscaler can respond to that much more quickly than staff can.
- For devs and sysadmins, hyperscalers are a boost because the better your tools, the more time you have to focus on what you need to focus on.
- Management consoles like Plesk fit in really well with hyperscalers. They are a tools that sits on top so you don’t need to understand Linux commands to do basic things (like install WordPress!)
- Where big providers focus on feature expansion to appease their huge enterprise customers, Digital Ocean takes a different approach: simplicity.
- SMBs are also concerned with scaling rapidly, but may not have the staff or resources to fully understand a solution from the big providers. Digital Ocean’s focus on simplicity means they don’t have to.
The Official Plesk Podcast: Next Level Ops Featuring
Joe Casabona
Joe is a college-accredited course developer and podcast coach. You can find him at Casabona.org.
Darian Wilkin
Darian is a Senior Solutions Engineer at Digital Ocean.
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