A Year of Innovation: DigitalOcean Managed Databases in 2025

A Year of Innovation: DigitalOcean Managed Databases in 2025 MCP Server (August) Advanced configuration for Managed Databases UI (August) Storage autoscaling (October) PostgreSQL 18 (November) Support for Remote MCP Server (December) Improved migration tooling in the cloud console (December) What’s to come in 2026 About the author Try DigitalOcean for free By Nicole Ghalwash Published: December 17, 2025 4 min read 2025 was a big year for DigitalOcean Managed Databases, packed with meaningful enhancements designed to deliver more power, flexibility, and simplicity for developers and businesses of all sizes. With performance boosts and new database engines introduced to improve scalability, automation, and observability, this year’s releases focused on making it easier than ever to build and run reliable data-backed applications on DigitalOcean. In this recap, we’ll walk through the most impactful launches in both the first and second half of the year and how they help teams move faster while keeping complexity low. First, let’s take a look at our releases in the first half of the year (H1) : – Managed PostgreSQL support for v17 [February] – Managed MongoDB support for v8 [March] – Support for up to 20TB for Managed MySQL and 30TB for PostgreSQL [March] – Introducing DigitalOcean Managed Caching for Valkey [April] – Introducing Role-Based Access Control to DigitalOcean Managed MongoDB with Predefined Roles [May] – Database Observability, Monitoring, and Hardening Advancements [June] – Support for Kafka Schema Registry [July] The second half (H2) of 2025 saw even more big developments for DigitalOcean Managed Databases: The DigitalOcean MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server lets you manage your cloud resources using simple, natural-language commands through AI-powered tools like Cursor, Claude, or your own custom LLMs. Running locally, it streamlines tasks such as provisioning Managed Databases, making cloud operations faster, easier, and more intuitive for developers. DigitalOcean MCP Server marks a major step forward in bringing AI directly into cloud infrastructure workflows. It allows users to seamlessly integrate cloud management into AI assistants or custom-built agents while eliminating context switching, manual API calls, and constant console navigation. MCP Servers make managing cloud infrastructure with LLMs faster, more secure, and far more accessible. We introduced advanced configuration options in the Managed Databases UI, giving developers more control without needing API calls or manual setup. With this update, you can fine-tune performance settings, customize connection parameters, and tailor your database environment directly from the dashboard. It’s a faster, more intuitive way to optimize your databases for your specific workloads. Launched at our Deploy conference in London, this feature marks another major milestone for automation in database environments.