This blog post is an adaptation of a talk I gave at the Cloud Native meetup in Birmingham in the UK in February 2020. It details the advantages of k3s, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution we have deployed as part of a managed Kubernetes service. Developed by Rancher Labs, k3s allows for quick deployments for testing, CI/CD runs and getting to grips with Kubernetes without having to commit to large-scale infrastructure and the costs that would bring.

We have made much of why we went with Rancher’s k3s to underpin Civo’s managed Kubernetes service in posts such as Andy’s explanation of k8s vs k3s, but I wanted to take a bit of a deeper dive into k3s and why in particular it is a great technological choice for a service such as ours.

Looking back over 2019 it's been a huge time of change for us as a company. When I co-founded Civo four years ago we were aiming to be an IaaS (Infrastructure-As-A-Service) provider, focusing on small developers and teams rather than huge corporate hosting requirements. The developer experience was really important to us, but trying to carve out a niche in such a crowded market was really challenging.

2019 has been a great year for cloud native technologies. This year we launched the world's first managed Kubernetes service back-ended by Rancher's k3s distribution, opened the #KUBE100 beta, and watched our users create some really neat things on our platform. To that end, we wanted to highlight some of our top posts from the wider Civo community, and posts that showcase the exciting state of play of the cloud native landscape at the moment.

The power of community, and doing things together as that community, was the overarching theme in much of KubeCon/CloudnativeCon presentations. We were incredibly lucky to be able to attend, experience and learn from so many Cloud Native experts and developers over the past week.

On an unassuming afternoon on Wednesday the 18th September 2019, we launched a world’s first! A k3s-powered, managed Kubernetes service. We were in for a ride... Since we had been taking applications for a few weeks already, when it came to beta launch day there were no shortage of applicants. It was very encouraging to see there was plenty of buzz online already.

After many months of feverishly working behind the scenes, we’re beyond excited to announce that the #KUBE100 beta program is live. #KUBE100 is the name of the beta program for the Civo Kubernetes service. What makes it unique is that it’s the first k3s-powered managed Kubernetes service on the market. Here's a little more insight into what we want to achieve with #KUBE100, from our CTO, Andy.

As a cloud provider and DevOps-focused company, we definitely want to practice what we preach. We see the benefits of a modern cloud native architecture, so we built our hosting of www.civo.com and api.civo.com (our application) to take full use of these modern decisions. This post describes our approach to Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) from a Chief Technical Officer's perspective.

This week Intel released a statement regarding Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS), another vulnerability in the "speculative execution" feature of modern processors. This is for HyperThreading and is the feature that allows the CPU to work out what commands will be run next, if they would affect the current running command and if not, run it on the same core.

In the words of the UFC's icon Bruce Buffer, with a 180 degree spinning announcement - "we...are...live..." and finally after a long beta period, we're ready to launch to the public as a whole. The beta period has been an excellent experience for us, and of course, a great learning curve.