Leveling Up Kubernetes: Key DigitalOcean Managed Kubernetes Releases in 2025

Leveling Up Kubernetes: Key DigitalOcean Managed Kubernetes Releases in 2025 Next Evolution of DigitalOcean Kubernetes [March] Q3 DigitalOcean Kubernetes Features/Releases [July] DOKS Support for DigitalOcean MCP Server [August] DOKS Managed Gateway API [September] Prioritize Node Pool Selection with Priority Expander Managed Gateway API [September] VPC NAT Gateway and Network File Storage (NFS) are now available on DOKS and NFS [November] Support for Multi-node GPU [December] What’s to come in 2026 About the author Try DigitalOcean for free Related Articles Speed Up Your JavaScript Apps: Native Bun Support is Now Available on App Platform A More Powerful, Code-First Knowledge Base Experience on the DigitalOcean Gradient™ AI Platform Introducing DigitalOcean Gradient™ AI Agent Development Kit: A code-first way to build production-ready AI agents By Nicole Ghalwash Published: December 15, 2025 5 min read 2025 was a busy and transformative year for DigitalOcean Managed Kubernetes, marked by a series of releases that make DigitalOcean Kubernetes simpler, more secure, and more scalable for developers and growing businesses. Across engine upgrades, networking and security enhancements, autoscaling improvements, and new ecosystem integrations, this year’s updates aimed to give teams more power with less operational overhead. Whether users are running production workloads, experimenting with microservices, or scaling customer-facing applications, the enhancements launched throughout 2025 make it easier than ever to deploy, manage, and optimize Kubernetes on DigitalOcean. In this recap, we’ll walk through the major releases that shaped the platform over the past year and how they help developers move faster with confidence. In March, we rolled out four major upgrades to DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS) that make it easier to run larger and more efficient workloads: increased cluster capacity, VPC-native networking, eBPF-powered routing, and Managed Cilium. Here’s a look at each one: Cluster capacity has doubled from 500 to 1,000 worker nodes , allowing bigger applications to run on a single cluster without the overhead of managing multiple environments. Cluster capacity has doubled from 500 to 1,000 worker nodes , allowing bigger applications to run on a single cluster without the overhead of managing multiple environments. VPC-native Kubernetes now assigns IPs directly from your VPC, improving performance and simplifying communication with other cloud resources. Replacing kube-proxy with eBPF-based networking and routing delivers faster packet processing and lower latency, benefiting high-traffic and real-time workloads. Managed Cilium with Hubble for observability adds stronger security, modern networking, and easier troubleshooting. Together, these features significantly boost scalability, performance, and reliability while reducing operational complexity of DOKS, so developers gain clearer visibility and a simpler networking stack, while businesses benefit from lower overhead and the ability to scale applications more efficiently. In July, we introduced four powerful new features to help you build and deploy more efficient applications on DigitalOcean Kubernetes—especially AI and machine-learning workloads.