Mist.io for DigitalOcean, and Every Other Cloud Provider, Is Awesome

Control all the things!

I love mist.io. However, I’ll stick with DigitalOcean Swimmer (Android only) for now. There’s even a few good looking iOS apps, but I haven’t tested them, Droplets for DigitalOcean and DigitalOcean Manager. Hopefully, paying for monitoring as well is something I can justify in a few months, when I have a steady job or am getting along with freelancing, which is really what I’d like.

But anyway, mist.io is a really nice service, but the website could use an update. It almost has a standard jQuery mobile feel to it. However, I do know they’re working on some UI changes that should be a vast improvement. But aside from that, the functionality is itself great. You can do the usual, like create new droplets, edit droplets, and you can add multiple backends.

Backends in mist.io are just connections to hosts, like DigitalOcean or Linode. They support a lot of backends, like RackSpace, OpenStack, AWS, HP Cloud, NephoScale, and even bare metal.

The DigitalOcean Swimmer Android app has a great interface, too. It seems to mostly abide by the Android style guide, which is freaking awesome. There’s a little gallery at the end with some screenshots of it as well as the mist.io website.

I love all the apps that support DigitalOcean (referral link), it’s partly why it’s so appealing to me. I really like mist.io because it supports sooo many providers though. The mist.io site looks good on a mobile device, but could still use some updating, which I’d be surprised if they weren’t already working on.

When I do add another different hosting provider (probably Linode), I’ll happily pay for the mist.io service. A real, native Android and even iOS client would be killer, please mist.io? :)

Photos below are of the mist.io site and a couple screenshots from the DigitalOcean Swimmer Android app. For iOS screenshots, see here and here.

At the very least you should give mist.io a try. All of the management features are free, like SSH key management, spinning up machines, and image managemenet. Monitoring is the only thing that is paid. So, you can get some really good use out of mist.io totally free!