DigitalOcean Acquires Nanobox | Hacker News Reader

DigitalOcean Acquires Nanobox

blog.digitalocean.com

52 pointsneom9 comments

As someone who’s reasonably technical, but hates server deployments, etc., I love Nanobox. I’ve been using it since it was PagodaBox.

Customers (including me) on their Slack were getting pretty worried about the lack of announcements from them. I hope this means it’s going to get even better, although I know many are worried that they’ll now drop support for platforms which aren’t DigitalOcean.

I actually enjoy deployment, managing and setting up a new linux VM is fun. What about deployment do you dislike?

Reliable backups. But this was a problem nanobox didn‘t solve it yet.

I think there's a couple of reasons:

- I've never felt comfortable with the command line, and only use it when I have to. I like the Nanobox will do everything for me with just a line or two (once you've created the Boxfile).

- Also, I tend to play around with a lot of small-ish ideas, so I want the ability to quickly throw something up without having to think about how I'd provision all the services, and if it did get big, I can scale it with Nanobox without having to figure out how to do it manually.

I'm in the same boat as you, I really really liked NanoBox because I could just not worry about deployment and I could stand up and tear down my whole infrastructure quickly after I was done with testing.

I was also concerned that NanoBox had gone quiet for a while, and I am a little scared of there being a DigitalOcean lock-in.

However... I love DigitalOcean and they seem to be going from strength to strength - looking at their block storage, managed databases and Kubernetes offerings as things I want to get playing with soon.

Excited for what the future holds for this.

A little off topic, but when did Ben and Moisey Uretsky (founders) leave their daily duties at DigitalOcean? Only shows them on the board now [1].

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/about/leadership/

Neither of them have ever not been daily on building DigitalOcean. Both of them work on it every single day. Moisey moved to a focusing on helping Ben and board structure the business around 2014. Ben started the process of looking for a CEO to do the next part about 2 years ago, and stepped back this year. However, as mentioned, both of them are still very actively involved.

This really is great news. I had the feeling that nanobox lost a bit of momentum. So I hope this means new updates and features.

Well, can't sign-up because it's been acquired. So it seems like vendor lock-in is pretty certain :(

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