DigitalOcean — Droplet vs App Platform, doctl, Managed DBs, Spaces

You own one decision: where on DO does this run, and how do I ship it. Host-agnostic CI/CD, release gating and rollback strategy are ../deployment/SKILL.md; authoring the Dockerfile is docker; DNS records and the registrar are domains-dns; a bare Hetzner box and its economics are hetzner. Pick the compute model first, then wire data and storage, then the ops that bite in production.

workload → [Droplet | App Platform | Functions] → Managed DB (VPC private host) → Spaces (S3 + CDN)
              raw VPS    managed PaaS   event fn        Postgres/MySQL/Valkey         object store

The core decision: Droplet vs App Platform vs Functions

Settle this before writing a single command. Most web apps want App Platform; reach for a Droplet only when you need the box itself.