DigitalOcean Boasts 700,000 Users, Disses Other Clouds

DigitalOcean CEO Ben Uretsky said in an interview with me last week that DigitalOcean is now over 700,000 users strong.
Founded in 2011, DigitalOcean has grown quickly to reach this milestone. “We have 700,000 developers in four short years,” Uretsky said, “whereas Amazon only has a million users and they've been around for basically a decade.”

While this may be true, Amazon has been making impressive amounts of money from its mere million users. In its most recent financial statements, Amazon reported its AWS segment as having an operating income of $718 million on revenues of $2.89 billion. DigitalOcean is still privately held, so these kinds of figures aren't available — I asked, the company declined to share them with me.

Uretsky was also somewhat critical of other, quite well known, cloud providers. “DigitalOcean is one of the only pure-play cloud companies in the world,” he said. “This business was started from the ground up with a laser-focus on delivering a cloud product, and we put that user experience front and center.”

“Versus an e-commerce that sells everything A to Z? Or an operating system that people have adopted? Or a search engine? What are those companies doing in the cloud business anyway?” he said.

DigitalOcean only recently added a block storage offering, something other cloud companies have had for a while now. Uretsky said the delay was mostly due to being so successful early on. “The traction that we saw with our original product, Droplet, really put a lot of strain on the business,” he said. “It took us a couple of years to be able to operationalize the company to the point where we could run an effective supply chain, keep up with demand, and really make sure that our operations were running smoothly.”

I can think of at least one other cloud provider who might have some experience with supply chain management and smooth operations.

Far more interesting is DigitalOcean's focus on the developer community, in particular the Open Source community. As Uretsky correctly points out, Amazon has not been nearly as generous with its contributions to Open Source as have Satya Nadella. It is this community aspect that Uretsky believes sets DigitalOcean apart.

However, as many startups are discovering, making money from Open Source is very difficult. The canonical example is RedHat, but the fact that RedHat tends to be the only example people can think of highlights the challenge entrepreneurs have had finding a way to make Open Source pay. He cites the work of Nadiya Eghbal of the Open Technology Fund in trying to figure out how people can get paid to work on Open Source technology that is otherwise given away.

Uretsky believes there's an opportunity in providing Open Source as a Service, where a commercial entity takes care of all the messy details of configuring technology so that customers can concentrate on using the technology instead. That appears to be where DigitalOcean is heading.

Hopefully it finds the winds favorable.

You can listen to the full interview with Ben Uretsky on episode 019 of The Eigencast here.

This article first appeared in Forbes.com here.