DigitalOcean Launches Drag-and-Drop Object Storage

DigitalOcean is extending its developer-friendly portfolio to include object storage. Called Spaces, the object storage product is the company’s seventh new offering over the past 18 months.

Spaces, which is available starting at $5 per month for 250 GB of storage, features a simple drag-and-drop UI. It also works with many existing AWS S3 compatible tools.

According to DigitalOcean, it launched Spaces today in response to thousands of requests from its developer community. In a survey of developers, also released today, DigitalOcean found that 45 percent of respondents use object storage, which means there are still a lot of developers looking for a storage service.

Developers said they consider cost effectiveness, uptime, and backup capabilities the most important factors when selecting a storage service. Object storage has seen pricing pressure over the past 12 months, according to a recent report by 451 Research. 

“A lot of DigitalOcean’s historic strength has been in simplifying the experience, providing a really clean developer experience out of the box,” Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady told Talkin’ Cloud in an interview.

Some of the most common use-cases for Spaces include hosting web assets, images and large media files, and archiving backups in the cloud.

“One of the things you end up finding, particularly as these applications grow or you want them to do different, more sophisticated things is that you begin to have more of a need for static object storage,” O’Grady said. “That could be for media files, it could be for logs, it could be for any number of things that you end up wanting to do.”

Spaces was made available to almost 90,000 users during its early access phase. Users can sign up now for a free two-month trial.

“Spaces is the most important product we’ve released since Droplet, the first SSD-based compute instance in the market,” DigitalOcean CEO Ben Uretsky said in a statement. “DigitalOcean is becoming the developer’s platform, providing storage, compute and networking capabilities to scale applications of any size. Despite the technical complexity of launching a product like this, we’ve worked incredibly hard to ensure Spaces maintains the same ease-of-use and effortless UI as our other products. We wanted to simplify the way developers can innovate so they can spend time building great software.”

In April, DigitalOcean launched a free server monitoring service for developers to gain insight into resource utilization and operational health of their Droplets, and earlier in the year the company launched its Load Balancers product.