Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The very first Civo Community Meetup is here! Episode #1 featured talks from Civo CTO Andy Jeffries and Developer Advocate Kai Hoffman, alongside #KUBE100 community members Saiyam Pathak and Alistair Hey. This meetup not only focussed on the direction of Civo and what's in store for the future for us, but also shared insights into the Civo marketplace and Terraform provider, plus k3s development using OpenFaaS with Civo k3s.

It feels like a lifetime ago, well, 3 years is a lifetime in tech, that I wrote a blog post explaining how we rewrote our API server from Golang to Ruby on Rails. Here we are and I'm about to explain about how we've been back and forth doing the same thing for our CLI. Just after that time, I wrote the first version of our CLI utility in Golang. However, with only me knowing Golang on the team, we weren't able to achieve the velocity and pace of adding features within the CLI as I'd like.

As Kubernetes continues to grow in popularity at a staggering rate, it’s only natural more and more people want to see what all the fuss is about. We’ve seen first hand how excited people are to try it out since launching #KUBE100 (our Kubernetes beta) – we’ve had tremendous interest and some great feedback so far. If you’re reading this and you have no idea what #KUBE100 is, it’s the name we gave to our k3s-powered, managed Kubernetes beta program.

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.