DigitalOcean launched a new managed platform that builds on its Kubernetes efforts and looks to differentiate itself from similar services provided by its larger cloud rivals by focusing on the needs of small- and midsized businesses.

The aptly-named App Platform is designed to automate infrastructure management to allow developers to more quickly deploy code to production. That code can come from a developer’s GitHub repository, or they can re-deploy automatically when updates are pushed to the source repo.

Arpuva Joshi, VP of product for DigitalOcean, explained that the platform is built on the company’s own Kubernetes work. That is its DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS) managed service platform that it initially unveiled in late 2018. Joshi noted that the new platform-as-a-service (PaaS) option further abstracts the complexity of Kubernetes from the end user.

“For the last couple of years we've built managed Kubernetes that took away some of the infrastructure management, and we wanted to take the next step and build the platform for some of the future successes as well, so that was the aspiration,” Joshi said. “Since we had managed Kubernetes up and running, we decided to essentially add another layer of abstraction on top of it.”

The platform initially supports a number of programming languages and frameworks, including Python, Node.js, Go, and Ruby. It also relies on Google’s open source gVisor for multi-tenancy cluster support and Cloudflare for DDoS and edge security protection.

As for the platform’s technical differentiation on the market, Joshi said that unlike similar PaaS offerings from larger players, DigitalOcean’s move is built directly on Kubernetes. He noted that this moves away from customized efforts that the other PaaS offerings have used to handle services like virtual machine (VM) management.

“From a technology perspective it's definitely different,” Joshi explained. “Most cloud providers technology that is built on PaaS, including Google App Engine, isn't built on Kubernetes, so from a technical perspective it is forward looking.”

Outside of any perceived technical difference, DigitalOcean is more focused on hitting the small and midsized market segment it feels is being missed by those larger players. Joshi explained that these organizations are overlooked by those larger players in terms of the support they provide and the level of customization that they need.

“This offering does not have all the bells and whistles that you would need from a typical enterprise customers, but it's built specifically for use scenarios around small startups and individuals where simple things of getting your code up and running, without making it more complex is the No. 1 differentiation,” Joshi said.

Joshi also noted that the App Platform move is “going to be the biggest investment we’ve in the company’s history for the last 2 to 3 years.”

“This is a very critical piece to our overall strategy,” Joshi said. “We have been talking about the death of [infrastructure-as-a-service] for years now and the reality is that it’s not going away anytime soon.”

This is also important for a vendor that has struggled to find its niche in the rapidly expanding cloud infrastructure market. And in fact, DigitalOcean was working through tough times even before the COVID-19 pandemic broke.

The vendor managed to snare $300 million in bank debt financing in February, which followed a broader corporate restructuring that resulted in dozens of job cuts. The restructuring came six months after the firm revamped its executive team and named a new CEO and CFO.

The company has since stabilized a bit as it scored a $50 million Series C funding round in May that pushed its valuation past $1 billion. DigitalOcean CEO Yancey Spruill at that time noted that the firm has seen increased demand during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic from “businesses transitioning to the cloud.”

DigitalOcean was also part of a group of vendors alongside Salesforce, Red Hat, and SAP that, according to a survey released by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), managed to steal market share from heavyweight Amazon Web Services (AWS) among software developers that work on cloud native applications.

UPDATED: The reference in this story to a dead link on DigitalOcean's website that announced its new CEO and CFO has been removed as DigitalOcean reactivated the link after this story was originally published.