DigitalOcean, the U.S. based provider of SSD powered cloud hosting for developers, has announced the release of its metadata service on Ubuntu and CentOS Droplets (cloud servers). Following the recent addition of the Linux Distribution CoreOS on their platform, which relies on the metadata service as a basic requirement, the company has expanded this service to now work on other Linux distributions.
The metadata service enables Droplets to query information about themselves, and allows the use of CloudInit to bootstrap new servers. Examples of available Droplet metadata include Droplet ID, data center region, IP addresses and “user-data” – a field that can hold a user-supplied script to help set up the system. For developers using Ubuntu or CentOS, this would save an immense amount of time by improving the provisioning experience.
“By providing the appropriate user data, Ubuntu and CentOS users can now create Droplets that install software on boot, configure that software and even register with a configuration management system without having to interact with the individual servers,” said Moisey Uretsky, chief product officer and co-founder.
Spin up multiple servers
Users who need to spin up multiple servers for their application can now pre-configure them by entering arbitrary user data upon Droplet creation. Being especially useful for power users who leverage DigitalOcean’s API, user-data can be consumed by CloudInit to perform tasks or run scripts during the first boot of a cloud server. With these upgrades, provisioning Droplets can be a completely automated process.
Users on the DigitalOcean cloud platform would be able to create a cloud server in 55 seconds. Featuring a 99.99 percent Uptime SLA, DigitalOcean has servers located in New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Singapore and London.
