DigitalOcean brings in Premium Droplets

DigitalOcean has announced new Premium Droplets plans with processors from Intel and AMD. The new Droplet types expand DigitalOcean’s Basic Droplet tier to offer faster performance and give customers the flexibility to choose the underlying hardware for their workloads.

Apurva Joshi, VP of Product, DigitalOcean, comments, “As our customers grow their businesses and test ideas with new applications, they need a variety of compute options to meet their needs. For those who want more power and control over their infrastructure, Premium Droplets offer a highly performant, faster central processing unit (CPU) option without having to upgrade to one of our dedicated compute plans. This is the perfect solution for startups and SMBs who are launching new products and want to keep costs down without compromising performance.”

DigitalOcean provides two types of Premium Droplets:

Premium Intel Droplets, powered by second generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, built-in AI acceleration and Intel mesh architecture to deliver consistent high performance. These Intel Xeon Scalable processors operate at a base frequency of 2.50 GHz and max turbo frequency of 3.90 GHz and have a memory frequency of 2933 MHz.

Premium AMD Droplets, powered by 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors based upon the “Zen 2” architecture. These AMD EPYC processors operate at a base frequency of 2.0 GHz and a max boost frequency of 3.35 GHz and support memory speeds of up to 3200 MHz.

In addition to higher processing power, Premium Droplets provide enhanced memory performance and include NVMe drives for faster disk performance. Premium Droplets can be used on their own or as worker nodes for DigitalOcean Kubernetes.

DigitalOcean Premium Droplets start at $6 per month. Premium Intel Droplets are available now in all data center regions, and Premium AMD Droplets are available in the NYC, SFO and FRA regions. More regions for Premium AMD Droplets will be added in the coming months.