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DigitalOcean's Metadata Service Allows Power Users to Automate Server Provisioning
[October 15, 2014]

DigitalOcean's Metadata Service Allows Power Users to Automate Server Provisioning


NEW YORK --(Business Wire)--

Today, DigitalOcean announces the release of its metadata service on Ubuntu (News - Alert) and CentOS Droplets (cloud servers). Following the recent addition of the Linux Distribution CoreOS on their platform, which relies on the metadata service as a basic requirement, the company has expanded this service to now work on other Linux distributions.

The metadata service enables Droplets to query information about themselves, and allows the use of CloudInit to bootstrap new servers. Examples of available Droplet metadata include Droplet ID, data center region, IP addresses and "user-data" - a field that can hold a user-supplied script to help set up the system. For developers using Ubuntu or CentOS, this will save an immense amount of time by improving the provisioning experience.

"By providing the appropriate user data, Ubuntu and CentOSusers can now create Droplets that install software on boot, configure that software and even register with a configuration management system without having to interact with the individual servers," said Moisey Uretsky, chief product officer and co-founder.



Users who need to spin up multiple servers for their application can now pre-configure them by entering arbitrary user data upon Droplet creation. Being especially useful for power users who leverage DigitalOcean's API, user-data can be consumed by CloudInit to perform tasks or run scripts during the first boot of a cloud server. With these upgrades, provisioning Droplets can be a completely automated process.

About DigitalOcean


DigitalOcean, Inc. (http://www.digitalocean.com / @digitalocean) offers simple SSD based cloud hosting. Headquartered in New York City, DigitalOcean has spun up over 2 million cloud servers since its inception.

Users can create a cloud server in 55 seconds, and pricing plans start at only $5 per month for 512MB of RAM (News - Alert), 20GB SSD, 1 CPU, and 1TB Transfer. Featuring a 99.99 percent Uptime SLA, DigitalOcean has servers located in New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Singapore and London. The interface has a simple, intuitive control panel, which power users can replicate on a larger scale with the company's straightforward API.

DigitalOcean uses KVM virtualization and additionally hosts a library of helpful walkthroughs and tutorials that cover server configuration and optimization. For more information, please visit http://www.digitalocean.com or email press(at)digitalocean(dot)com.


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