digitalocean-overview_skill

Overview

This skill provides a concise DigitalOcean platform overview for account setup, projects, and tooling, plus a service map across compute, storage, databases, networking, management, and teams. It helps teams onboard, choose services, and plan automation using the Control Panel, doctl CLI, REST API, or Terraform. Use it to align architecture and operational practices with DigitalOcean capabilities.

How this skill works

The skill outlines the main entry points for interacting with DigitalOcean: the web Control Panel for interactive tasks, doctl for CLI automation, the REST API for integrations, and Terraform for infrastructure as code. It describes account and access setup steps, recommended project organization, and the core service categories so you can match workloads to the right products. It also maps to more focused skill areas for deep dives on compute, storage, databases, networking, management, and teams.

When to use it

• Onboarding new developers or ops staff to DigitalOcean
• Planning which DigitalOcean services fit a workload or architecture
• Setting up accounts, teams, projects, and access controls
• Designing automation and CI/CD with API, doctl, or Terraform
• Choosing backup, storage, or managed database strategies

Best practices

• Create Projects to group resources by app, environment, or team for clear ownership
• Enable 2FA, use scoped API tokens, and add SSH keys for secure access
• Use doctl and the REST API for repeatable automation; codify infra with Terraform
• Standardize naming and tagging to simplify search, billing, and incident response
• Pick managed services (databases, object storage, managed Kubernetes) to reduce operational burden

Example use cases

• New project kickoff: create a Project, add team members, generate API tokens, and provision a Droplet or App Platform service
• CI/CD automation: register a token, install doctl in pipelines, and deploy with API calls or Terraform
• Scaling a web app: choose load balancers + droplets or App Platform, attach volumes for persistent storage
• Data platform: use managed databases for Postgres or Redis and Spaces for object backups
• Network isolation: configure VPCs and firewalls, reserve IPs, and map DNS for multi-environment deployments