Today, to coincide with the first day of CNCF’s KubeCon event, we are delighted to announce that DigitalOcean’s Managed Kubernetes services is now production ready and Generally Available.

When we introduced DigitalOcean Kubernetes last year, we made it possible for you to spin up Kubernetes in minutes. With our simple and scalable Kubernetes service, all you need to do is define the size and location of your worker nodes, while DigitalOcean provisions, manages, and optimizes the services needed to run your Kubernetes cluster.

Hundreds of businesses and thousands of developers are running their apps using DigitalOcean Kubernetes, and we are grateful for the encouraging feedback we’ve received.

At Grammofy, our goal is to build exciting digital music experiences for classical music listeners. Since we started using DigitalOcean Kubernetes, we need not spend nearly as much time on IT administration, and even developers without an IT background can control our infrastructure. We are a small company and this frees valuable resources for product development.– Matthias Kümmerer, CTO, Grammofy

We are a leading developer & operator of mobile casual games with offices in San Francisco and Singapore. We adopted DigitalOcean's Managed Kubernetes to deploy one of our analytics systems. We chose DigitalOcean because of its developer-friendly dashboards, clear pricing schema, and excellent documentation. These things made it possible for Super Lucky to create a Kubernetes cluster, stateful deployments, load balancers and services in a matter of days instead of weeks.– Alan Morales, Senior Software Engineer, Super Lucky

With the help of our customers, we’ve been working hard on enhancements to our Kubernetes service. Most notably, we’re pleased to introduce a free, integrated monitoring service that automatically provides insights and alerts for your clusters. In addition, DigitalOcean Kubernetes now supports the latest Kubernetes release, 1.14, which introduced 31 enhancements to the container orchestration platform. Now you can also schedule automatic patch version upgrades, e.g. 1.14.1 to 1.14.2, for your clusters.

Finally, because the service is now Generally Available, you can now spin up clusters in each city where we have a data center: New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, London, Frankfurt, Bangalore, and Toronto.

Monitor resources and manage your Kubernetes cluster, all in one place

DigitalOcean allows you to run your Kubernetes cluster on top of Standard, General Purpose, and CPU Optimized Droplets, which offer numerous combinations of CPU, RAM, and SSD. In order to right-size your infrastructure for your applications and services, you need visibility into your cluster’s resource utilization. Now, when you visit the Kubernetes section in your dashboard, you’ll see average resource usage for each of your Kubernetes clusters.

From there, you can drill in to view time series graphs for your overall cluster, its node pools, and individual worker nodes. DigitalOcean currently provides these metrics:

CPU usage

Load average (1, 5, and 15 minute)

Memory usage

Disk usage

Disk I/O

Private bandwidth

Public bandwidth

To stay on top of potential issues for individual worker nodes, you can also set alerting thresholds for CPU usage, memory usage, disk usage, disk I/O, incoming bandwidth, and outgoing bandwidth. DigitalOcean can alert you via Slack or email.

Advanced metrics simplify monitoring of your Kubernetes deployment

In addition, DigitalOcean also provides an option for advanced health metrics. To activate these additional metrics, you’ll need to deploy the kube-state-metrics agent to your cluster.

kube-state-metrics listens to the Kubernetes API server and generates metrics about the state of your cluster deployment and resource allocation, including:

Pod deployment status

DaemonSet deployment status

StatefulSet pod deployment status

If you’re interested in obtaining additional insight into the performance of your Kubernetes cluster, you may want to consider deploying a service mesh such as Linkerd.

TEN7 is a full-service agency that creates and cares for Drupal-powered websites. When we were looking for a Kubernetes provider, we first tried Google Kubernetes Engine, but weren't impressed with its pricing or their service. With DigitalOcean, we get strong API support, clear pricing, fast and friendly customer support. The difference is night-and-day. We chose DigitalOcean.– Ivan Stegic, President, TEN7

Come see us at Kubecon

If you’re in Barcelona for this week’s Kubecon, we hope that you’ll come to see us at our booth (located at P6). You might also want to check out tomorrow’s talk by our developer advocate, Eddie Zaneski, in which he’ll share his wisdom about monitoring and logging for Kubernetes. We look forward to meeting many of you there!

Coming soon: Marketplace 1-Click Apps for Kubernetes

Now that DigitalOcean Kubernetes is Generally Available, we’re turning our focus to additional features that will help you do even more with the platform. One high priority: 1-Click Apps for Kubernetes. Over the past few years, a CNCF project called Helm has emerged as the de facto package manager for Kubernetes. With Helm, you can deploy software packages called Charts to your Kubernetes clusters, often to facilitate monitoring, logging, service discovery, and more. While you can deploy Helm charts to your DigitalOcean Kubernetes clusters today, we’re improving DigitalOcean Marketplace so that it includes Kubernetes-ready applications. Once released, you'll be able to deploy 1-Click Apps and Helm charts to your clusters.

If you’re a software vendor interested in including your applications in the DigitalOcean Marketplace, we’d love to hear from you.

Stay tuned

We’ve got much more in store for DigitalOcean Kubernetes, including improvements like auto-scaling and a Container Registry. But what will not change is that you can get started with DigitalOcean Kubernetes without breaking the bank, since your master node is free. If you haven’t yet, we encourage you to spin up a DigitalOcean Kubernetes cluster!

Happy coding,

Phil Dougherty

Senior Product Manager