Part 4 — Tutorial: IaaS with DigitalOcean
On this page 4 headings
DigitalOcean is an IaaS provider. It gives you the hardware and the operating system on which to host your application.
Key term: Droplet
Section point: A Droplet is DigitalOcean’s term for a virtual machine.
The droplet shown in the lecture (it hosts the verisim web page) had 1 GB memory, 25 GB disk, and ran Ubuntu 18.04. From the dashboard you can monitor bandwidth, CPU usage, disk I/O and so on.
Creating a droplet, step by step
- Log in / sign up and create (or open) a project, giving it a name, description and purpose. Existing resources can be moved into it if needed.
- Create a droplet.
- Choose a region (data centre). The example chooses Bangalore, closest to us.
- Choose the operating system and version (e.g. Ubuntu).
- Choose the droplet type / plan.
- A basic droplet is enough for simple applications such as blogs, discussion forums and small projects.
- CPU options: regular, or premium Intel/AMD.
- Shared CPU vs dedicated CPU.
- Plans range up to very large machines (around 256 GB RAM and multi-terabyte storage in the lecture). The price is calculated per month, starting from about $6/month at the time of the lecture. Extra storage can be added.
The illustration below shows the droplet configuration options.
- Choose the authentication method:
- SSH key: connect securely from your own terminal; or
- Password.
- Optional extras: enable monitoring and backups.
- Create the droplet, then log in with the credentials you set.
Connecting to the droplet with SSH
Deploying the application on the droplet
Section point: After logging in to the droplet you deploy just as you would on your local system: check out the code (e.g. from GitHub), set up the web server and database server, and run the application. With IaaS, all of this is your job.
The droplet dashboard also shows live resource graphs. This is your first taste of monitoring, covered fully in Part 7.