March 2025 Summaries

DigitalOcean is announcing a major evolution of its Kubernetes Service (DOKS), with four new features that aim to simplify and improve the scalability, performance, and security of its users' applications. The first feature doubles the maximum worker node count per cluster from 500 to 1,000, allowing businesses to scale their workloads more efficiently without managing multiple clusters. The second feature enables native routing between clusters and virtual private clouds (VPCs), simplifying network configurations and enhancing performance. The third feature introduces eBPF-powered networking, which significantly improves data plane processing and reduces latency. The fourth feature brings Managed Cilium for high-performance networking, providing enhanced security, reliability, and scalability. These updates aim to reduce operational complexity, increase application performance, and simplify networking, allowing businesses to focus on innovation rather than managing infrastructure.

DigitalOcean is now powering the development of AI applications by providing a range of AI/ML offerings, including Bare Metal GPUs with NVIDIA Hopper architecture. These computing resources are available in their European data center based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, offering EU-based companies direct access to high-performance AI infrastructure. The proximity of this location reduces latency for real-time AI programs and applications serving European markets. DigitalOcean's commitment to privacy ensures that customer proprietary data remains within the region where customers choose to host such data, providing straightforward data sovereignty for EU workloads. The company's Bare Metal GPUs provide maximum performance, complete system control, additional security, predictable performance, optimized hardware, tailored setup, and a combination of advantages with powerful hardware specs, making them ideal for ambitious AI projects in European markets.

DigitalOcean has introduced larger storage plans for its Managed MySQL and PostgreSQL services in select regions, including Singapore, San Francisco, and Frankfurt. The expanded storage options are now available with up to 20TB for MySQL and up to 30TB for PostgreSQL, allowing users to scale their databases more easily and efficiently. This upgrade enables businesses to support large databases without worrying about storage constraints, while also providing control over performance and costs. DigitalOcean's fully managed service offers the benefits of scalability, security, and simplicity, making it easier for users to manage their infrastructure as their business grows. The expanded storage options are available in these regions with plans to roll out to more areas later this year.

DigitalOcean has announced that GPU Droplets are now SOC 2 Type II compliant, providing customers with a trusted environment for experimenting and scaling AI projects. This achievement demonstrates DigitalOcean's ongoing commitment to security and simplicity, allowing customers to build on a foundation of proven security practices and controls. With the addition of GPU Droplets, users can leverage NVIDIA H100 GPUs to develop chatbots, train large language models, or analyze big data in an efficient and cost-effective manner, making advanced AI simple to use. The availability of GPU Droplets in multiple data centers, including TOR1 and NYC2, further expands DigitalOcean's offerings for customers seeking high-performance computing capabilities.

MongoDB 8.0 has been released, bringing significant performance, scalability, and security enhancements to DigitalOcean Managed MongoDB, making it an even more powerful database engine for cutting-edge applications. The new version features upgrades designed to enhance performance, security, and ease of use, including improved query efficiency, expanded encryption capabilities, better time-series handling, greater performance control, and expanded client-side encryption. With these improvements, customers can enjoy faster reads, higher throughput for updates, 200% faster time series aggregations, and up to 50x faster resharding, among other benefits. Upgrading to MongoDB 8.0 ensures applications benefit from the most advanced features and optimizations available, while DigitalOcean Managed Databases makes upgrading simple and hassle-free with no downtime or manual maintenance required.

The DOKS routing agent is a managed component for configuring static routes on Kubernetes worker nodes. It enables users to configure IP routes using a dedicated Kubernetes Custom Resource, particularly useful for VPN setups or tunneling egress traffic through specific gateway nodes. The routing agent supports multiple gateways and automatically configures ECMP (Equal-Cost Multi-Path) routing to distribute traffic across them, allowing users to override default routes without disrupting cluster connectivity. Routes can be applied to specific nodes using Kubernetes label selectors, ensuring fine-grained control over network configurations. The routing agent can be enabled or disabled using doctl or the DigitalOcean API, and it streamlines static route management in Kubernetes with features such as predictable IP addresses for outbound traffic and support for VPN setups, custom egress routing, and self-managed VPC gateways.

Hatch is DigitalOcean's global program for startups, offering credits and discounts on computing resources to help them build and scale without worrying about costs. In 2024, Hatch revamped its program to better support AI/ML startups, providing discounts for GPU Droplets and free access to premium support. Ex-human, a startup building empathetic generative AI solutions, chose the Hatch program to serve their customers with AI models, citing DigitalOcean's GPU Droplets as reliable and intuitive, allowing them to focus on product development. The Hatch program provides up to $100,000 in compute credits, three months free of an NVIDIA H100x8 GPU Droplet, complimentary premium support, and GenAI usage with Hatch credits. By partnering with companies like Grindr, Ex-human's technology has the potential to help humans form stronger bonds in both physical and digital worlds.

Growing businesses need networking solutions that are simple, scalable and reliable. Our latest networking updates, including Network Load Balancer, IPv6 for Load Balancers, and Reserved IPv6 for Droplets, aim to make cloud infrastructure more powerful and easier to manage. The new Network Load Balancer is designed to handle high-traffic volumes with greater efficiency and resilience, offering lower latency, higher throughput, and better handling of real-time workloads like gaming and streaming applications. Additionally, the introduction of Reserved IPv6 for Droplets provides teams with predictable networking while keeping infrastructure simple and cost-effective. These updates empower businesses to build resilient, high-performance applications without added complexity.

Meet Apple Li, the Director of Financial Planning and Analysis at Digitalocean, who drives sustainable growth by aligning financial vision with company goals. She joined the company in 2019 after a career as an equity research analyst, seeking a fast-growing and innovative environment to make an impact. Digitalocean's mission to simplify cloud computing resonates with her passion for helping developers and businesses grow. As part of the Product & Technology org, Apple helps with budget planning, financial analysis, and tracking metrics, ensuring the company understands the return on investment of its products and projects. Her team focuses on translating company initiatives into financial plans, driving efficient resource allocation to achieve revenue growth and customer expansion. With a strong emphasis on collaboration, business partnership, and analytical skills, Apple's team is looking for individuals who share these qualities and are passionate about the cloud space.