The Next Evolution of DigitalOcean Kubernetes: Introducing Features that Unlock Superior Scalability for Growing Businesses

Posted: March 31, 2025•4 min read

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The Next Evolution of DigitalOcean Kubernetes: Introducing Features that Unlock Superior Scalability for Growing Businesses

Kubernetes is the foundation of many modern applications, providing the scalability and resilience needed for today’s dynamic workloads. However, as applications grow, so do their infrastructure and scaling requirements. Managing multiple clusters to handle large-scale workloads introduces operational complexity, increased network management, and challenges for the DevOps teams. These challenges can include greater resource fragmentation, increased latency due to inter-cluster communication, and the manual burden of maintaining security and compliance across multiple clusters. These challenges are particularly pronounced for data-intensive workloads like video streaming, large-scale data analytics, and security operations.

That’s why we’re excited to announce a major evolution of DigitalOcean Kubernetes Service (DOKS), which consists of four features:

Increased cluster capacity to 1,000 worker nodes per cluster
Optimized networking with VPC-native Kubernetes
Improved performance with eBPF-powered networking
Managed Cilium for high-performance networking

These updates help to empower businesses to run larger workloads within a single DOKS cluster, reducing the need for complex multi-cluster management and unlocking new levels of performance, reliability, and simplicity.

NoBid, a Kubernetes customer who joined us at Deploy 2025, has seen significant improvements in scalability and security when deploying DOKS. “DigitalOcean Kubernetes provides NoBid with a powerful platform for our containerized workloads," said Shawn Petersen, CIO at NoBid. “Additionally, the ability to rapidly scale based on business demand, handle 1.3 PB/month in data egress, along with better security controls were all key differentiators for us to partner with DigitalOcean." If you want to learn more about NoBid’s use case, check out their case study. Also, you can learn more about their migration from AWS to DigitalOcean and their subsequent 30% cost-savings by watching the testimonial they gave at Deploy 2025.

An overview of each new feature, and what it means for your business

This announcement consists of four features that are new and coming to DOKS. It is important to understand and differentiate each one thoroughly, which is what the text below will do.

Increased cluster capacity

The first feature increases cluster capacity. We’ve doubled the maximum worker node count per cluster from 500 to 1,000, enabling businesses to scale effortlessly while keeping infrastructure streamlined and cost-efficient. With this increased cluster capacity, you no longer need to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters just to scale your workloads. This simplifies operations, reduces administrative overhead, and ensures a more consistent application performance across environments. Now, developers can deploy larger, data-intensive applications on a single DOKS cluster, simplifying operations and enhancing scalability.

Optimized networking with VPC-native Kubernetes

The second feature we’re bringing to you is VPC-native Kubernetes, which assigns IP addresses directly from your virtual private cloud (VPC) address pool. This feature enables native routing between cluster and VPC resources, seamlessly integrating DOKS clusters with your existing network architecture. This enhances network performance, simplifies inter-cluster communication, and removes the need for complex network configurations—allowing your workloads to operate more efficiently. You can read more about this feature in our earlier blog post.

Improved performance with eBPF-powered networking

The third feature now replaces kube-proxy with eBPF-based routing, significantly improving data plane processing, bandwidth efficiency, and network latency. Unlike traditional packet filtering methods, eBPF enables high-performance, in-kernel processing, which reduces context switching overhead and accelerates packet processing times. Overall, this feature is especially beneficial for high-volume applications, such as real-time analytics, transaction-heavy workloads, and microservices architectures that require low-latency communication between services.

Managed Cilium for high-performance networking

The fourth feature is bringing Managed Cilium to DOKS for high-performance networking. With fully-managed Cilium running on the control plane, developers enjoy enhanced security, reliability, and scalability. By reducing operational complexity, businesses can focus on innovation rather than managing networking infrastructure. Additionally, the integration of Cilium Hubble provides enhanced network observability, making troubleshooting and performance optimization easier than ever.

What this means for your business

Overall, this next evolution of our Kubernetes service will significantly enhance your environment, benefiting developers and decision-makers alike.

For your environment: Experience greater scalability, improved performance, and simplified networking, allowing applications to run more efficiently with reduced operational overhead.

For your developers: Enjoy a seamless experience with better observability, enhanced security, and less complexity in managing networking infrastructure. Developers can focus on innovation instead of troubleshooting connectivity issues and ensuring clusters are communication.

For your business: Reduce infrastructure costs, minimize complexity, and improve application reliability, helping to ensure that your services can scale effortlessly as business demands grow.

We remain committed to evolving DOKS and delivering the simplicity and reliability that developers love, allowing you to focus on building great applications without the operational headaches. Whether you’re handling data-intensive applications, scaling services to meet growing demand, or optimizing infrastructure costs, the evolution of DOKS brings a new wealth of benefits.