Digital Ocean is another case of a traditional cloud provider attempting to get into the GPU game. However, with standard pricing of $3.44 per H200-hr, no slurm and no kubernetes, we expect it will be difficult for them to compete for business where the customers is not already locked into their ecosystem.
Trying to create a “GPU Droplet”
While we were unfortunately unable to create a GPU instance directly on the Digital Ocean console directly, we were able to access a machine via PaleBlueDot, a marketplace discussed later in this article. The single machine showed reasonable performance, but without the ability to create clusters, no shared storage or high performance networking, monitoring, or health checks in place, it is difficult for us to recommend using Digital Ocean GPUs for anything more than a bare minimum developer machine.