DigitalOcean, a global cloud hosting provider headquartered in New York City, has announced that FreeBSD is now available as the first non-Linux operating system on DigitalOcean’s platform. FreeBSD is a Unix-like open-source operating system that – like other BSD releases – is derived from Unix. This OS would provide developers with greater flexibility to compile their software from source rather than the packaged binary paradigm that Linux follows.
The availability of FreeBSD, which was highly requested by developers using the DigitalOcean platform, was made possible with a recent update to its data centers’ backend codebase, specifically the release of their meta data service. Originally built to complement the release of CoreOS, it has allowed for quicker progress on all future distributions.
“DigitalOcean will continue to give developers more options,” said Moisey Uretsky, co-founder and chief product officer of DigitalOcean. “FreeBSD differs from Linux in its history and philosophy; we want to continue shipping products our users are asking for.”
100+ Person Organization
The release was possible early in the New Year due to DigitalOcean’s engineering team’s laser focus over the past few weeks, led by Neal Shrader, senior software engineer at DigitalOcean.
“The internal structure of DigitalOcean’s engineering team has evolved significantly over time due to the dynamic growth of the company,” said Shrader. “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.”
Featuring a 99.99% Uptime SLA, DigitalOcean has servers located in New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Singapore and London. The interface of DigitalOcean’s cloud server platform is said to have a simple, intuitive control panel, which power users can replicate on a larger scale with the company’s straightforward API.
FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for modern server, desktop, and embedded computer platforms. FreeBSD‘s code base has undergone over thirty years of continuous development, improvement, and optimization. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals.
