DigitalOcean today announced the launch of its new load balancing service for developers who run their applications on its platform. For the most part, this is a pretty straightforward product. Like any load balancer, DigitalOcean’s version allows you to ensure better uptime for your applications by allowing you to distribute connections between multiple servers. That means it’s now easier to scale applications horizontally when traffic spikes and there’s no single point of failure (well — unless your one database goes down).
Until now, DigitalOcean’s users had to roll their own load balancing setups on the service. Now, this feature is available for $20/month and accessible from both the company’s dashboard and through its APIs. It includes support for multiple protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS and TCP. As for the load balancing itself, you’ll be able to choose between two algorithms: Round Robin and least connections.
Setting up these load balancers should only take a few clicks. The company tells me that provisioning them should take less than a minute. They will also be available in all of DigitalOcean’s data center regions around the world.
DigitalOcean says it now has almost one million registered users and more than 40,000 teams are actively using the service. The company, which was notoriously slow in rolling out new services in its earlier years (mostly because it spent most of its time simply scaling the existing service), is now starting to focus more on meeting its customers’ demand. While the company started out with its basic and cheap virtual private server offering, it’s now getting to a point where its ambition to offer a more complete cloud computing platform is coming to fruition. In terms of products, that includes the launch of its dedicated block storage service last year, as well as the introduction of floating IPs, which make hosting more complex and highly available applications on the platform easier. The company also recently launched an improved monitoring service.