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Provider news · July 2025

What the providers shipped

July 2025 saw some predictable but essential updates across the VPS landscape. DigitalOcean's latest contributions include an AMD GPU observability package (finally), an inference-optimized GPU Droplet image, and the timely release of Ubuntu 25.04—not quite the speed of others but enough to keep us all scratching our heads. Linode's Kubernetes Engine received the usual set of updates, and a new Cloud Pulse monitoring feature in beta may just save some developers the embarrassment of realizing too late their apps are in trouble. UpCloud threw its weight behind the compute-heavy with the addition of GPU Servers, and Vultr, as usual, stuck it to the folks needing networking fixes. It's the same old, same old with a pinch of overdue features and a heap of unnecessary GPU overkill.

DigitalOcean

  • Jul 28 DOKS AMD GPU observability — AMD GPU worker-node metrics and ROCm Device Plugin.
  • Jul 23 Debian 11 image deprecated — bullseye-backports reached end of life.
  • Jul 22 Inference-optimized GPU Droplet image — Preinstalled Docker and vLLM.
  • Jul 21 Ubuntu 25.04 Droplet image — New base image available in control panel and API.
  • Jul 17 Fedora 42 Droplet image — New Fedora base image released.
  • Jul 17 Partner Network Connect in LON — Available in the London region.
  • Jul 16 App Platform XL build (private preview) — Doubles build CPU and memory.
  • Jul 15 AMD Instinct MI325X GPUs — Available by contract for GPU Droplets and DOKS, 1- and 8-GPU.
  • Jul 8 App Platform VPC support (preview) — VPC connectivity for apps in FRA/NYC/TOR.
  • Jul 7 Kafka schema registry — Enable schema registry to enforce producer/consumer compatibility.
  • Jul 1 DOKS database operator deprecated — Existing databases remain operational.

Linode

  • Jul 23 LKE updates — Updates to Linode Kubernetes Engine functionality.
  • Jul 15 Akamai Cloud Pulse (Beta) — Cloud Pulse monitoring feature launched in beta.

UpCloud

  • Jul 4 GPU Servers are now available — GPU Servers with NVIDIA L40S launched for AI/ML and compute-intensive workloads.

Vultr

  • Ubuntu 20.04 LTS End-of-Life — Ubuntu 20.04 removed at EOL; upgrade to 22.04 or 24.04.
  • AlmaLinux Networking Fixes for Bare Metal — Fixed bugs for greater compatibility between AlmaLinux and Vultr Bare Metal.
  • Serverless Inference Auto-Chunking Fix — Resolved a Serverless Inference Vector Store file/collection item processing issue.
  • CLI and API Documentation for Vultr Managed Apache Kafka — New Console/API Kafka features now supported by open source libraries.
  • VPC2 No Longer Available for Managed Databases — VPC2 network can no longer be chosen for DBaaS ahead of VPC2 deprecation.
  • Vultr Service Account Users Can Now Be Added — API-only service users for secure, automated access to cloud resources.

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