The DigitalOcean Newsletter

Your monthly deep dive into all things DigitalOcean, including product updates, new tutorials, upcoming events, and more.

We're launching Ripple Writers, a paid program for technical writers who want to publish about their DigitalOcean experiences on their own blogging platforms—Medium, Substack, Dev.to, LinkedIn, personal blogs, wherever you share your work. If you're building with our products and documenting what you learn, we'll pay you for published articles that help other developers make informed decisions. 

Submit your pitch →

Introducing the VPC NAT Gateway for centralized egress and static IPs

This fully managed, highly available service simplifies networking by giving your private resources (Droplets, DOKS) a single, consistent public IP for all outbound traffic. It securely connects your internal services to the internet while automatically blocking all external inbound connections. Simplify compliance and eliminate the complexity of self-managed NAT instances.

Per-second billing for Droplets to slash costs for ephemeral workloads 

Effective January 1, 2026, we're moving to per-second billing (with a 60-second minimum) for Droplets. This offers truly granular cost control, drastically reducing spending on short-lived workloads, such as running batch jobs and automated testing. The monthly cap remains in place for budget predictability on sustained tasks.

New Identity Providers (IdPs) available for DigitalOcean Single Sign-On

We’re excited to announce that DigitalOcean Single Sign-On now supports four new Identity Providers: Jumpcloud, authentik, Keycloak, Auth0. You now have more flexibility to integrate your preferred identity solution, streamlining access management and improving user experience across your organization. 

PostgreSQL v18 now available for DigitalOcean Managed PostgeSQL

PostgreSQL v18 brings significant improvements to performance, developer experience, and reliability. Key features include a new Asynchronous I/O (AIO) subsystem that speeds up ready-heavy workloads, virtual-generated columns for more efficient schema design, and a new uuidv() function to improve performance for UUIDs.

GPU Observability metrics for Droplets and DOKS 

Our new GPU observability metrics for Droplets and DOKS clusters are now live, offering key data on utilization, temperature, power, and interconnect performance—all available for free in the DigitalOcean Insights UI with zero setup required. 

Environment Support and App Cloning for App Platform 

Simplify the complexity of managing growing application portfolios with the new Environment Support for App Platform (powered by Projects) and App Cloning, a new feature to replicate your apps in just a few clicks.

Migrating to DigitalOcean App Platform 

Review the conceptual foundations of App Platform and how you can collaborate with AI assistants (like Claude Code, Cursor, or Gemini) to migrate apps step-by-step; plus, check out our detailed migration guide on GitHub.

Running your cloud workloads shouldn’t be complex or expensive. That’s why we’re bringing you Sail to Success, a webinar series designed to help you simplify, scale, and save with DigitalOcean.

Register for our December webinars

• December 4: Gradient™ AI Platform Updates: New image and audio models, Sitemap support, and more
• December 10: Cloud-to-Cloud Workload Migration: Drivers, Benefits, and Challenges 
• December 17: Stop the manual struggle of managing NAT instances and bastion hosts

Check out our webinars in our YouTube playlist.

• YouTube has become the go-to classroom for AI and machine learning education—our roundup of educational AI YouTubers features creators like Tina Huang, Siraj Raval, and Matt Wolfe who break down everything from research papers to hands-on coding tutorials.

• When GPU nodes sit idle waiting for data, your expensive compute dollars go to waste—our comparison of network file storage options for AI/ML workloads explores solutions like DigitalOcean's Network File Storage that keep training clusters fed with the concurrent access they need.

• Modal isn't the only game in town for serverless ML deployment anymore. Explore our guide to Modal alternatives comparing platforms like DigitalOcean Gradient AI, RunPod, and Baseten on cost, performance, and developer experience.

• Vision-language models can caption images and answer questions about visual content, but their internal reasoning remains a black box—learn how visualizing vision-language models with attention maps and saliency techniques reveals how these systems actually think.

• If you're looking to secure your Linux infrastructure without the performance overhead and compatibility headaches of traditional endpoint agents, Sandfly Security's agentless approach continuously hunts for threats via SSH while deploying ephemeral scanners that remove themselves after each scan.

• LLMs excel at generating logical-sounding text but struggle with genuine multi-step reasoning—hierarchical reasoning models introduce a brain-inspired architecture that performs deeper internal reasoning rather than relying on verbose Chain-of-Thought token chains.

To help improve your security, we are updating our session management policy here at DigitalOcean. Starting November 20, 2025 we’ve introduced an update to how sessions work in the DigitalOcean Cloud Console to keep your account even more secure. You’ll now see incremental reminders to save your work at 10 minutes and then 1 minute prior to session expiration. At 12 hours, your session will automatically end — but don’t worry! If you’re working across multiple tabs, logging back into one will restore access in all of them, so you can pick up right where you left off.

DigitalOcean is dedicated to constantly improving the developer experience. We are excited to announce two updates to our Managed Kubernetes offering that are designed to do just that. DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS) now officially supports Kubernetes v1.34, which supports specialized workloads, particularly AI/ML workloads, offers operational resilience and cost optimization with in-place pod resizing.

This version also improves both the security and the developer experience by leveraging updated API functionalities/integrating enhanced container isolation. Secondly, improved metrics and observability insight within DOKS, specifically the control plane, makes it easier for you to quickly identify, diagnose, and resolve cluster performance issues, ensuring greater stability and uptime for your applications. These updates will be automatically applied to your Kubernetes environment, so no action is needed.

The DigitalOcean Marketplace offers 1-Click apps and tools to help you build faster—no setup hassle. Check out the newest solutions and see what’s fresh this month.