DigitalOcean's term for a virtual machine (VM) in the cloud. Droplets are scalable Linux VMs that range from shared-CPU basic plans to CPU-optimized, memory-optimized, and GPU-accelerated configurations. They are the fundamental compute unit in the DigitalOcean ecosystem and can run any Linux workload.
A startup deploys their Node.js API on a $12/month Basic Droplet (2 vCPU, 2 GB RAM) in the NYC3 region. As traffic grows, they resize to a CPU-Optimized Droplet with 4 dedicated vCPUs and enable automated backups — all without changing their application code.