Storage that thinks for itself: Introducing Storage autoscaling, the newest feature for Managed Databases

Published: October 2, 2025
3 min read

TL;DR: Storage autoscaling for our suite of Managed Databases is here, offering an automated way to right-size your storage. Get started with the new feature now:

→ Spin up a database cluster to access Storage autoscaling

→ Read our product documentation

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→ Want to learn more? Contact sales

Have you ever experienced the stress of a “disk full” error on your database? It’s a frustrating situation that can lead to performance issues, application downtime, and a frantic scramble to manually resize your storage. Rest easy developers and database administrators: you’re about to get your peace of mind back. Introducing Storage autoscaling, for our entire suite of Managed Databases.

This new capability for DigitalOcean Managed Databases automatically increases your database’s storage size when needed, so you don’t have to. It’s the automated, proactive safety net that your growing application needs.

How it works: your database, but smarter

At its core, Storage autoscaling is about proactive prevention. The way it works is it continuously monitors your database’s disk utilization. When a configurable threshold is exceeded, it automatically scales up your storage in the background. This seamless, automated process helps to ensure that your database remains available without requiring any manual intervention from you. All Managed Database users have access to this new feature, as it is now available for all of our offerings, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Kafka, and OpenSearch.

How Storage autoscaling helps you

Autoscaling isn’t just a new feature. It’s a better way to manage your growing application. Here’s what this launch means for you:

1. Improved performance and reliability

This feature is designed to prevent performance degradation and potential outages caused by a database running out of disk space. By automatically adding storage when needed, it helps ensure your application remains responsive, even during unexpected traffic spikes or data growth. All in all, this new feature helps to ensure that your application will stay up and running as its data and needs grow.

2. Reduced operational overhead

Remember those manual checks and late-night alerts about disk space? With autoscaling, those are a thing of the past. Our platform takes care of the critical maintenance task of resizing storage, freeing up your development team to focus on building new features, innovation, and improving your core product, not on database administration.

3. Cost optimization

This feature helps to promote cost-efficiency by letting you provision storage in smaller, automatic increments as you need them. You avoid having to buy and pay for large amounts of unused disk space upfront. This flexibility eliminates the risk of a costly, emergency upgrade to a much larger plan, keeping your storage costs minimized and directly aligned with your actual requirements.

4. Ability to right-size your workloads

Autoscaling helps to ensure that you always have the right amount of storage, both automatically and in near real time. Instead of overprovisioning “just in case_”_, this feature scales storage up precisely when you need it, monitoring your cluster to match resources to demand. By removing the guesswork, Storage autoscaling helps keep workloads right-sized and performance optimized without manual intervention.

How developers use Storage autoscaling

To show you how this feature can make a difference, here are a few examples:

Managing traffic spikes and seasonal surges: For E-commerce companies, Black Friday sales, viral marketing campaigns, or app launches can drive huge bursts of transactions. With autoscaling, your database scales storage in lockstep with demand without manual intervention.
Preparing for volatile data such as log and event data growth: Apps that store logs, metrics, or IoT event data can balloon in size during an incident or audit period. Autoscaling means you can preserve all the data you need without scrambling for space.
Multi-tenant growth within a SaaS company: In the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) industry, a single high-activity customer (or a rush of new sign-ups) can push your storage past its limit. Autoscaling makes that growth a non-event from an ops perspective.
Failproofing CI/CD test environments: Automated test runs often generate massive temporary datasets. Autoscaling helps ensure your test pipelines don’t fail mid-run due to full disks.

Storage autoscaling provides a simple, yet powerful solution to a common problem. Now you can have confidence that your managed database can seamlessly handle data growth without manual intervention, allowing you to focus on what matters most: building an amazing application.