App Platform, Managed Databases & Kubernetes

App Platform (PaaS)

Deploys directly from a Git repo — build, deploy, and scale handled without manual Droplet management. A higher-level abstraction over raw compute, trading low-level control for operational simplicity — DigitalOcean's answer to Heroku/Render.

Managed Databases

PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis/Valkey, MongoDB with provisioning, patching, backups, and failover handled by DigitalOcean. Tradeoff: less fine-grained control (custom extensions, config flags) than self-hosting on your own Droplet, in exchange for reduced operational burden.

DOKS — Managed Kubernetes

doctl kubernetes cluster create my-cluster --region nyc3 --size s-2vcpu-4gb --count 3
doctl kubernetes cluster kubeconfig save my-cluster
kubectl get nodes

DigitalOcean manages the control plane (API server, etcd, scheduler); you only manage worker nodes and workloads — the same operational-offload principle as EKS/GKE.

Spaces & Container Registry

Spaces is S3-compatible object storage (optionally with a built-in CDN) — many S3-targeting tools work with just an endpoint/credential change. Container Registry stores Docker images pulled by DOKS, App Platform, or Droplets running Docker.

Monitoring & 1-Click Apps

Built-in monitoring tracks CPU/memory/disk/bandwidth with alert thresholds (email/Slack). 1-Click Apps launch a pre-configured Droplet image (WordPress, a dev stack) without manual setup from scratch.