App production company Engine Yard is to use DigitalOcean’s hosting infrastructure for app developers working on Deis, its open source platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

Engine Yard will direct open source contributors working on Deis to use DigitalOcean’s hosting which, it claims, is so developer-friendly that customers can create a cloud server in 55 seconds.

Hosting credits

As an inducement to encourage open source contributions to Deis, DigitalOcean will provide free hosting credits to developers who have code merged into the mainline Deis project.

These incentives will attract software teams to employ Docker-based applications using Deis and DigitalOcean, according to Edward Chiu, Digital Ocean’s director of customer success. “Deis provides a streamlined workflow for managing distributed applications. It’s the kind of developer-focused platform as a service we love seeing built on top of our cloud. As we grow and service more developers, tools like this will be invaluable,” said Chiu.

DigitalOcean is now the world’s second largest host of web-facing computers, according to Internet services company Netcraft. Its virtual computers (known as droplets) are designed to help Deis contributors who aim to code on large-scale clusters.

As the suites of hosted solutions are subject to change, many public cloud vendors struggle to mask their complexity, said Gabriel Monroy, creator of Deis and chief technology officer at Engine Yard. The rationale is to hide the complexity and keep things as clear and simple as possible for developers, to help them make better decisions. “Developers working on the Deis codebase already gravitate toward DigitalOcean, so we know it’s a terrific solution. We are thrilled to promote DigitalOcean as the best way to hack on Deis,” said Monroy.