DigitalOcean launches a fast SSD-based block storage service

It looks like DigitalOcean Inc. has been putting the $130 million line of credit that it took out five months ago to good use. Following numerous user requests, the provider is adding a block storage service to its public cloud today that offers speedy SSD-based capacity starting at $0.1 per gigabyte per month.

The price is identical to what Amazon Inc. charges for the standard solid-state memory tier of its rivaling Elastic Block Store and similarly includes the cost of read/write operations. Other major infrastructure-as-a-service platforms such as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Engine bill IOPS separately, which is convenient in certain specialized use cases but can complicate payment otherwise. DigitalOcean’s effort to keep pricing simple will no doubt be appreciated by its users, most of whom are developers or small companies that don’t require the advanced functionality offered by rivaling providers.

The provider’s unique focus on ease-of-use is one of the main reasons why it’s seen the number of instances provisioned in its platform jump from 10 million to 18 million over the past year. DigitalOcean now claims to be the second largest infrastructure-as-a-service vendor on the market and the fastest-growing of them all, momentum that today’s update should help accelerate.

The new block storage service provides the ability to separately provision computational power and capacity for the first time, which makes the company’s platform much better suited to support data-intensive use cases. As a result, organizations that have until now been running such workloads on competing platforms might be tempted to switch over. Databases, file systems and analytics tools like Hadoop are just a few of the applications that fall into this category.

DigitalOcean says that users can resize storage volumes as the capacity requirements of their workloads change and squeeze up to 16 terabytes of data into a single logical drive. Customers also benefit from a built-in replication mechanism that makes multiple copies of their records to ensure no information is lost in the event of an outage, another feature borrowed from Amazon’s playbook. The new block service is available immediately and is already finding use at notable tech firms like GitLab