DigitalOcean offers easy-to-use managed cloud hosting service with simple user interface and powerful command line tools, which make it easy to deploy your code quickly and manage your server from anywhere on the globe.
DigitalOcean has invested significant of money to its infrastructure to make it truly a complete cloud engine. They have expanded geographic footprint, and introduced new products such as DigitalOcean Kubernetes, App Platform, and Managed Databases to its infrastructure. Companies such as Gitlab, Slack, Ghost, Cloudways and Whatfix are using DigitalOcean for years now.
App Platform
DigitalOcean App Platform is very easy to use and you can get started with it right away. It also have a lot of great features so you can build, deploy, and scale apps quickly as possible. DigitalOcean will handle the infrastructure, app runtimes and its dependencies, that means you can focus more on your code and its business logic.
With DigitalOcean, you can scale your apps to handle traffic as it grows. It is very cost effective and effectively optimize resources as you scale your apps.
Kubernetes & Load Balancers
With Kubernetes, you can easily scale up and deploy containerized apps in clusters. If you’re ready to start using containers but don’t want to worry about managing them, DigitalOcean is a great choice. Load balancers on DigitalOcean are simple to set up. It helps to manage distribute incoming traffic across a group of Droplets and increase your application’s availability with Load Balancers.
Introducing a new $4 Droplet
If you have an existing business or other online presence, then you’re likely familiar with the cost of hosting and managing multiple server instances. DigitalOcean is introducing a new Droplet priced at $4/month encouraging more developers across the globe to try its Droplets. This Droplet comes with 1 vCPU, 512MB memory, 500GB bandwidth, and a 10GB SSD, perfect for developers want to learn new skills and proof of concept for the next big app ideas. The price changes will be available starting July 1, 2022.
Backup
Backups are an important part of any hosting environment, but they’re often overlooked or not easy to implement. Droplet backups have always affordable and simple to enable. Backup Droplets disk images once per week, priced at 20% of the cost of the Droplet. If you destroy the Droplet, backups will also be removed and purged. However snapshots, on-demand full disk image of a Droplet work opposite. They will still be on your account until you delete it even after the Droplet is removed. Snapshots can be used to restore an existing Droplet or create a new Droplet from that point in time.
Developer Support
DigitalOcean offers free 24/7 technical support. There are three levels of support provided by the support team to meet your needs. You can send inquiries and contact the support team agent at any time and get help. They also have an active forum, a community where users can post questions and get answers from other developers. In addition, you can find number of comprehensive articles, tutorials and official docs related to any products and services they provide to the customers.
In summary here are the few reasons I use DigitalOcean:
They provide virtual machine, Kubernetes, App platform, storage, database, and many more.
Easy to use, economical, scalable, and adaptable for web.
Affordable, reliable and quick deployment.
Server quality is great and server spec is perfect for various business.
Droplet backups are easy to enable and affordable.
Excellent tutorials and articles provided by the community and expert.
DigitalOcean grow with a global community. Whether you’re a developer looking to deploy your next project or an enterprise business company looking to build out a new product, DigitalOcean has a solution for you. So what are you waiting for? Try DigitalOcean today with a $100, 60-day credit to get started. That’s enough resources to run a website or app that you can build and start growing a successful business.
Google announces Flutter 3. We all have been waiting forMaterial 3, Games Toolkit, macOS, Linux Support and Fordable Phone Support. Wait is over, finally it has arrived. Google and the open source community has put a lot of hard works to Flutter 2.0 and now they have released Flutter 3.0 with much more exciting features. Today we look into the new features that Flutter has in this major changes!
1. Flutter Firebase
A collection of tools is always necessary to have when building and launching applications. Data storage, cloud functions, authentication and app testing for different platform requires comprehensive third-party tools such as Firebase, AWS Amplify and AppWrite.
For example, Firebase is an amazing back-end platform backed by Google which accelerate app development process providing powerful backend infrastructure for the applications.
Flutter and Firebase work hand-in-hand to help you build web and mobile apps. This is not a surprise for any of us as we know both these products are belongs to one company, Google.
Majority of Flutter developers use Firebase in their apps. Over the last few releases Flutter team have been working with Firebase to expand and provide better integration for Flutter as a first-class integration. Flutter Crashlytics plugin helps to track real-time fatal errors with the same set of features through Firebase’s real-time crash reporting service. Firebase Crashlytics is a lightweight, realtime crash reporter that helps you track, prioritize and fix stability issues that erode your app quality.
2. macOS and Linux Support
According to a 2021 developer survey, Flutter is the most popular cross-platform mobile framework used by majority of global developers. Flutter desktop support is still far behind compared to mobile support specially in its early releases.
Flutter was stable for Windows in previous versions and now it supports both linux and macOS as well. Now you can build apps for all desktop platforms without ever worrying of breaking your code. You can build production ready applications for all platforms using flutter.
3. Mobile Updates
Smoother experience
Flutter apps now contribute 120Hz refresh rates that were previously limited to only 60Hz on iOS devices. This increase helps to have a smoother experience on iOS devices specially during animations.
Fordable Phone Support
Finally the newest release supports for fordable mobile devices. The new widgets and its core features will bring more natural experiences to fordable devices.
4. Web updates
Faster image decoding and scrolling
Flutter web now automatically detects and uses the ImageDecoder API in browsers that support it. As of today, most common browsers have added this API. Because of ImageDecoder API the image rendering for web is more efficient and the speed is twice faster than the previous versions. In overall the performance is major improvement for new update.
App lifecycle API
The new lifecycle API provides you flexibility to control over the Flutter framework. Now you can run Flutter apps in headless mode on the web. This gives you the flexibility to control the bootstrap process of your app from hosting HTML page, and check Lighthouse analysis for the performance of your app. For example you could preload the content while showing a login screen or a progress bar! You can get more information, Customizing web app initialization on docs.flutter.dev.
5. Material 3
Material 3 is known as the next generation of Material Design. Flutter 3 does not have full support for material 3 yet, only certain widgets support material 3. Flutter 3 provides opt-in support for Material 3. Maybe in future release, all the widgets might have material 3 support and could be the standard default for flutter.
6. Theme Extensions
Theme extension feature enable themes more convenient. It enables customizing theme by adding custom colors and custom color names to the flutter theme. You are not stuck with default colors that comes with flutter anymore. It is now much easier than ever to add our own color to flutter apps.
7. Flutter’s Games Toolkit
The Flutter team has released an easy-to-use casual games tool kit for casual gamers. It is a specialized starter kit of various templates which mean you can write your game code with Flutter casual Games Toolkit.
Now you can deploy casual games much quickly on multiple platforms. Flutter game repo has pre-integrated modules for in-app purchases, Ads & more. However if you want to develop 3D games, then flutter is not the right choice rather you want to go for Unity 3D.
8. Dart 2.17
Dart 2.17 stable was announced along with Flutter 3.0 with many long-awaited features that developers have been waiting for. Dart is the secret sauce behind Flutter, and any improvements in Dart would help improve Flutter’s development.
According to Dart and Flutter team, Dart 2.17 adds major new support for members on enums, refines how you can use named arguments in constructors, and makes code for forwarding parameters to superclasses much less verbose and repetitive. We will look into the new features of Dart 2.17 in more details in the coming articles.
