Product Lifecycle Stages

Product lifecycle stages define how we stage, release, and retire product functionality. Our product lifecycles stages are private preview, public preview, and general availability (GA).

Private Preview

Private previews are initial releases of potential future products or features. Participating in private previews gives you the opportunity to test, validate, and provide feedback on future functionality, which helps us focus our efforts on what provides the most value to you.

Private previews are available by invitation only in one or more datacenters. They are unsupported and do not have SLAs. All offerings follow our standard pricing and billing procedures, and modified pricing for previews is subject to change.

At the end of a private preview, we determine whether to continue an offering through its lifecycle. We reserve the right to change the scope of or discontinue a private preview product or feature at any point in time without notice, as outlined in our terms of service.

Private previews are not appropriate for production-level workloads. We recommend using simulated test data and not running sensitive workloads on private preview products.

Public Preview

Public previews are preliminary releases of products and features that are ready for broader testing and usage as part of an incremental roll-out strategy.

Public previews may be free or paid, and we may track and measure SLAs but do not back them by issuing credits. Public previews follow our standard retirement process. All offerings follow our standard pricing and billing procedures, and modified pricing for previews is subject to change.

All customers can opt in or out of public previews from the Feature Preview page. Public previews may be free or paid and available in one or more datacenters. Where appropriate, we define and measure SLAs, but do not back them by issuing credits.

We expect but do not guarantee that public previews perform for production-level workloads. We recommend using simulated test data and not running sensitive workloads on public preview products.

General Availability

General availability products and feature are fully functional and openly accessible to all DigitalOcean customers for production use. They are often available in all datacenters, but may only be available in limited datacenters.

General availability offerings follow our standard pricing, billing, SLA, and retirement procedures.

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.

We are committed to being clear, transparent, and proactive when interacting with you, 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 third-party providers. Where possible and appropriate, DigitalOcean attempts to migrate 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. Similarly, we may need to retire integrated third-party software or services due to the third party’s 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 endeavor to provide as much advance notice as possible.

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.