DigitalOcean Launches FreeBSD Cloud Servers, Answering Developers

As countless user surveys have shown, Linux is a predominant platform for many cloud deployments, with Ubuntu reigning king. In fact, many surveys show that more than half of OpenStack deployments are built on Ubuntu.

However, there are other open source operating systems of interest for cloud deployments and that is the space that open source SSD cloud host DigitalOcean plays in. This week, the company has announced FreeBSD hosting that can be implemented with Linux.

FreeBSD has a long and storied history, and companies ranging from Apple to Yahoo have built around it as an essential platform tool. DigitalOcean has announced that FreeBSD is now available as the first non-Linux operating system on its platform. FreeBSD is a Unix-like open-source operating system that, like other BSD releases, is derived from Unix. The OS provides developers with flexibility to compile their software from source rather than the packaged binary paradigm that Linux follows.

“DigitalOcean will continue to give developers more options,” said Moisey Uretsky, co-founder and chief product officer of DigitalOcean, in a statement. “FreeBSD differs from Linux in its history and philosophy; we want to continue shipping products our users are asking for.”

DigitalOcean officials said they pursued FreeBSD because it "was highly requested by developers using the DigitalOcean platform."

“The internal structure of DigitalOcean’s engineering team has evolved significantly over time due to the dynamic growth of the company," Neal Shrader, Senior Software Engineer at DigitalOcean, said. "What began as a couple of guys coding furiously in a room in Brooklyn has ballooned to a 100+ person organization serving hundreds of thousands of users around the globe. There has been a continued focus on improving how we approach, prioritize and execute this work – the FreeBSD Image is a testament to successful alignment.”

DigitalOcean claims that users can create a cloud server in 55 seconds with its platform, and pricing plans start at $5 per month for 512MB of RAM, 20GB SSD, 1 CPU, and 1TB Transfer. You can find out more here.