How does a small startup butt its green horns with dominant cloud bulls Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google Cloud Platform? DigitalOcean LLC is making headway by winning over developers and hand selecting must-have features for modern application creation. It’s proving to be fertile ground for the company, getting them in at companies that were this close to shaking with industry giants such as AWS.

DigitalOcean wants to be the number one cloud platform for developers, according to Shiven Ramji (pictured), vice president of product. The ideal platform would “make it very easy for a developer to go from concept or idea to production as fast as they can,” he said.

Ramji spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Lauren Cooney (@lcooney), founder and chief executive officer of Spark Labs Consulting LLC, at the KubeCon CloudNativeCon EU event in Denmark. They discussed DigitalOcean’s Kubernetes announcement for container orchestration in software application deployments, and what’s ahead for the company.

Customers ask and receive native Kubernetes support

The company’s intense focus on removing friction for software development in cloud environments pushed the right button; last year, DigitalOcean signed the one millionth developer to the platform, and it currently has 500,000 developers actively using it. Now developers are turning on their companies to adopting the platform instead of much larger competitors.

“We are in their consideration set, because they’re like, ‘Well, developers love this product, and I can get a cost benefit. Why would I not do that?” Ramji explained.

The company’s built out a core, complete feature set for modern applications built in the cloud. These include load balancers, cloud firewalls, object storage, block storage, a new control panel experience, and a bunch of networking features. Customers are finding the platform offers everything they desire from AWS or Google with a better price-to-performance ratio, according to Ramji. 

DigitalOcean takes a cue from AWS in its customer relations; that is to say, customers ask for a feature, and the company delivers. This is why the company just rolled out native support for Kubernetes — the open-source management platform for containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications).

“You can come into our platform and, within a few clicks, deploy a Kubernetes cluster with your typical integrations of monitoring or container registry and the Kubernetes dashboard,” Ramji concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon EU.

Photo: SiliconANGLE