DigitalOcean

An AI cloud built around Droplets

DigitalOcean is a cloud company that presents itself as an AI-native cloud, with one platform covering agents, inference and infrastructure. The Droplet, a virtual machine that customers provision and run themselves, remains the company's central offering. It lists Droplets alongside managed hosting, databases and developer tools, and it describes its aim as giving developers and smaller businesses a cloud that is simple to use and predictable in cost.

Five layers from GPUs to agents

The site describes the platform as five layers that run together: infrastructure, the core cloud, an inference engine, data and learning, and agent runtimes. The company says this removes the need to join several vendors, and it lists open integrations with agent tools, databases and retrieval systems. The aim is to keep an agent running on the same stack as the data and models it depends on.

Inference and managed agents

Serverless inference gives access to a catalog of more than eighty models, with routing that sends each request to a suitable model. The company says customers pay for the inference they use. Managed Agents, which the site says is in public preview, provides an agent runtime with governed access to a large library of tools.

Droplets and managed hosting

The Droplet range includes basic, CPU-optimized, general-purpose, memory-optimized and storage-optimized machines, and GPU machines are also listed. Its website hosting and managed services are aimed at people who want to build ecommerce stores and websites without running the servers themselves. The company describes Cloudways, its managed hosting service, as built around simplicity, flexibility and performance. It publishes an uptime commitment for Droplets and block storage volumes.

Developer resources

DigitalOcean runs a developer center with learning material, a community home with development and DevOps guides, and a web design publication. Its products are designed to be used by people who prefer to do the work themselves as well as by those who want expert help.