Over the last 18 months, we’ve delivered many cloud primitives to serve developers and their teams in our unique DO-Simple way. We introduced Load Balancers, Monitoring and Alerts, Cloud Firewalls, Spaces, CPU-Optimized Droplets, a new Dashboard, and new Droplet pricing plans. We extended the availability of Block Storage to all regions. All of these primitives make it easier to go from an idea to production without the overhead and complexity of managing cloud infrastructure.

Today, we’re excited to build on those primitives and announce DigitalOcean Kubernetes, a simple and cost-effective way to deploy, orchestrate, and manage container workloads. Deploying workloads as containers provides many benefits for developers, from rapid deployment to isolation and security. But orchestrating those workloads comes with additional layers of complexity that can be difficult for development teams to manage.

Kubernetes has become the leading open source platform for orchestration, with thousands of contributors in the last year alone. DigitalOcean has been running large workloads on Kubernetes over the past two years, and we’re excited to bring our learnings and expertise to our customers.

We designed DigitalOcean Kubernetes with developers and their teams in mind, so you can save time and deploy your container workloads without needing to configure everything from scratch. Automatic deployment of load balancers, block storage, firewalls, ingress controllers, and more makes configuring your cluster on DigitalOcean as simple as deploying a Droplet.

We understand having your data close to your cluster is essential, so you’ll have the option to deploy a private container registry to your cluster with no configuration, and store the images on DigitalOcean Spaces.

In addition to offering Kubernetes on our platform, we are also upgrading our CNCF membership to Gold. We’re committed to contributing to and supporting the open source technologies around containers, and are looking forward to working with CNCF members to continue the evolution of these and related technologies.

The DigitalOcean Kubernetes Early Access Program sign-up starts today, and access for select users begins next month. If you’re part of the program, your cluster will be free through September 2018.

UPDATE: June 21, 2018

Since we announced DigitalOcean Kubernetes in May, we've received 20,000 sign-ups for early access. We’re excited to announce our first phase of early access, and want to take this opportunity to share more about our plans.

We will be sending out early access invitations in two phases:

Phase One : Beginning on July 10, we'll send invitations for up to 1,000 developers, looking for feedback on key features and product usability.

: Beginning on July 10, we'll send invitations for up to 1,000 developers, looking for feedback on key features and product usability. Phase Two+: At a future date, we'll expand testing, and invite as many developers as we can based on capacity.

We want to keep everyone up to date on our progress, so we’ll also provide email updates during early access as new product functionality is added, and as our Community team creates new Kubernetes content. Finally, look out for a webinar invitation where we’ll walk you through the early access product as we’d love to hear your feedback through this process.

Happy Coding,

DigitalOcean Kubernetes Product Team