Digital Ocean launches Spaces, its object storage service

Digital Ocean today announced Spaces, its object storage service. This complements the company’s block storage service. Both of these services have different use cases, of course; unlike the block storage service, Spaces — as an object store — can scale up far beyond the 16TB limit of the block storage service because it’s not volume-based and not about connecting storage to a virtual machine.

For Digital Ocean, this marks yet another expansion beyond its core cloud computing service and shows the company’s ambition to more directly challenge large competitors like Amazon, Google and Microsoft in this market (though those obviously still offer a far wider range of service than Digital Ocean).

“Object storage has been one of the most requested products that we’ve been asked to build,” John Gannon, the company’s product manager for its cloud storage services, writes in today’s announcement. “When we embarked on developing a scalable storage product that is abstracted from compute resources, we realized we had an opportunity to refactor and improve how developers solve this problem today.”

The company also notes that this service is compatible with many of the existing AWS S3 tools, and that all of the data sits on disks with 256-bit AES-XTS full-disk encryption. Developers also can encrypt their files with their own keys before uploading them, of course.

Pricing for the service is pretty straightforward: you pay $5 per month with 250GB of storage and 1TB of outbound bandwidth included. Beyond that, you pay $0.02 per GB stored and $0.01 per GB transferred. Digital Ocean also is offering a free two-month trial for developers who want to kick the service’s tires.

Spaces is now available in the company’s NYC3 region and will arrive in the AMS3 region before the end of the year, with more regions following in early 2018.