Product Release Lifecycle Stages

Product lifecycle stages define how we stage, release, and retire product functionality.

Our product lifecycles include beta, early availability, and general availability.

Note

Our terms of service govern your use of DigitalOcean and cover details of eligibility, content, use, payments & billing, and warranties. This document is not a contract and all use of DigitalOcean’s services are subject to the terms of service.

Beta

Beta offerings are initial releases of potential future products or features. Customers who participate in our beta programs have the opportunity to test, validate, and provide feedback on future functionality, which helps us focus our efforts on what provides the most value to our customers.

• Customer availability: Beta invitations may be public or private. Participation in private beta releases is by invitation, and customers may choose not to participate. Public invitations may be through feature preview.

• Support: Beta releases are unsupported.

• Production readiness: Beta releases may not be appropriate for production-level workloads. We encourage users to use simulated test data and avoid running sensitive workloads in beta products.

• Regions: Beta offerings may only be available in select regions.

• Charges: Beta offerings may be charged or free. However, free use of beta offerings may be discontinued at any point in time.

• Retirement: At the end of a beta release, DigitalOcean determines whether to continue an offering through its lifecycle. We reserve the right to change the scope of or discontinue a Beta product or feature at any point in time without notice, as outlined in our terms of service.

Feature Preview

Feature preview lets you opt into public betas from within the control panel. To see which beta offerings are available in feature preview, in the left menu of the DigitalOcean Control Panel, click Settings. Click the Feature Preview tab to go to the Feature Preview page.

To enable a feature preview for a beta offering, click the offering name on the left, then click Enable or Disable. You can also give feedback for a beta offering from the Give feedback link in the description.

Early Availability

Early Availability offerings are fully functional products and features that are enabled for specific user groups as part of an incremental roll-out strategy.

• Customer availability: Early Availability functionality can be rolled out to all customers or specific segments of users in addition to or in place of existing functionality.

• Support: Early Availability offerings are provided with the same level of support as General Availability features and products.

• Production readiness: They are expected, but not guaranteed, to perform for production-level workloads. We encourage users to use simulated test data and avoid running sensitive workloads in EA products. Where appropriate, SLAs are defined and measured, though not backed by a process of issuing credits.

• Regions: Early Availability offerings may or may not be available in all of DigitalOcean’s geographic regions.

• Charges: Early Availability offerings follow our standard pricing and billing procedures and are charged (or not) in the same way that General Availability offerings are, except for SLA refunds.

• Retirement: In the event we retire an Early Availability product before General Availability, we strive to follow the Retirement procedures outlined below.

General Availability: Regional and Global

General Availability offerings are fully functional products that are openly accessible to all DigitalOcean customers for production use.

• Customer availability: All DigitalOcean users have access to General Availability offerings.

• Support: All General Availability offerings are fully supported.

• Production readiness: General Availability offerings can be used for production-level workloads.

• Regions: General Availability products and features fall into one of two categories:

  • Regional Availability products are not yet available in all regions.

  • Global Availability products are available in at least one datacenter in all of DigitalOcean’s regions.

• Charges: General Availability offerings follow our standard pricing and billing procedures.

• Retirement: General Availability offerings follow the Retirement procedures outlined below.

Retirement

The decision to retire or deprecate features follows a rigorous process including understanding the demand, use, impact of feature retirement and, most importantly, customer feedback. Our goal is to invest resources in areas that add the most value for the most customers

DigitalOcean is committed to being clear, transparent, and proactive when interacting with our customers, especially about changes to our platform. To that end, we make our best effort to follow these guidelines when retiring functionality:

• Advance notice. For minor changes resulting in retirement or deprecation of functionality, we attempt to proactively notify customers at least 1 month in advance. For retirement of major features or products, we attempt to notify customers at least 6 months in advance.

• Viable alternatives. DigitalOcean strives to provide viable alternatives to our customers when retiring functionality. These may be alternative offerings from DigitalOcean or recommended alternatives from 3rd party providers. Where possible and appropriate, DigitalOcean automatically migrates customers to alternatives for retired functionality.

• Continued support. DigitalOcean commits to providing continued support for functionality until its retirement date.

We may need to accelerate the timeline for retirement of functionality in extenuating circumstances, such as essential changes necessary to protect the integrity of our platform or the security of our customers and others. In these cases, it is important that those changes occur as quickly as possible.

Similarly, integrated third party software or services may need to be retired due to the third-party decision to change or retire their solution. In these situations, the pace of the retirement is out of our control.

However, even under these circumstances, we provide as much advance notice as possible.