That’s a wrap for Civo Navigate Tampa 2023! Before we reflect on everything that happened, we want to thank everyone who made the event so special and memorable. Over two days, we welcomed everyone into Armature Works, where an amazing lineup of speakers took to the stage to shine a light on everything cloud native.

With a range of product launches, including Civo ML, Civo Platform, and Civo Database, this blog will provide an overview of everything you need to know about Civo Navigate.

Steve Wozniak

Kicking off the event on Tuesday morning, Mark Boost (CEO) and Dinesh Majrekar (CTO) had the chance to sit down on stage with Steve Wozniak and talk about the future of tech and his time at Apple.

“Woz provided attendees with an inside look into how he developed and designed the Apple I and Apple II, which became one of the first mass-produced and highly successful microcomputers, in the mid to late 1970s He discussed misconceptions promoted by feature films based on the life of his former business partner, the late Steve Jobs.” outlined a news article from Catalyst

Woz also shared his thoughts on Tesla and Lucid Electric Cars, from past experiences he and his wife Janet Hill had, before moving on to talk about his time in college (both the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of California, Berkeley).

Mark Boost and Steve Wozniak on stage at Civo Navigate

New launches at Civo

Throughout day 1, Josh Mesout (Chief Innovation Officer), Dinesh Majrekar (CTO), and Saiyam Pathak (Director of Technical Evangelism) took to the stage to outline everything we had been working on behind the scenes.

Civo ML

One of the key launches we made during Civo Navigate was our fully managed development environment that allows you to leverage the scale of Civo compute for machine learning and AI projects. Josh Mesout outlined how Civo aims to invest and expand into the Cloud Native Ecosystem, not just build more barriers to adoption.

Civo ML from the Civo Navigate product launch by Josh Mesout

The New Stack reported on this launch, saying, “The Kubernetes cloud provider is betting that developers don’t want to deal with the infrastructure piece of the ML puzzle. So its new offering will run the infrastructure for ML as a managed service, while supporting open source tools and frameworks. It believes this will make ML more accessible to smaller organizations, which it said are often priced out of ML due to economies of scale.”

Our team is extremely excited to announce our first frontier within machine learning, “Kubeflow as a Service.” Through this, we are focused on accelerating how companies can adopt open source cloud native technologies to enable autonomy and interoperability.

We will be releasing more information on how you can register for Alpha access soon.

Civo Platform

Get ready to say goodbye to DevOps headaches with Civo Platform! With this announcement, we shared how our fully-managed PaaS makes releasing code and deploying apps a breeze. All you have to do is push your code through Git and let Civo take care of the rest. Focus on bringing your code to life and watch your productivity soar as Civo handles the heavy lifting. Plus, as your app grows and evolves, Platform grows along with it, scaling up and down as needed.

“Too often developers outgrow their PaaS provider,” said Mark Boost in an article with Computer Weekly. “We want to be there to grow with businesses, ready to support their changing development needs as they scale up. Developers don’t want complexity: they want an affordable, flexible, and customizable approach to PaaS that lets them focus on innovating for the business.”

While Civo Platform is currently in Alpha, Beta will be opening soon! In the meantime, we’ll release more information on how you can get involved in the upcoming weeks.

Civo Database

Our powerful and scalable managed database service, Civo Database, was also announced during Civo Navigate. With this new addition to our product offering, users can choose from different pricing tiers based on their needs and only pay for what they use. This aims to provide a reliable, flexible, and cost-effective solution for managing databases in the cloud.

Discover more about our managed databases offering here.

OpenCP

Dinesh and Saiyam also announced OpenCP, an opensource tool created by the Civo team that aims to simplify the deployment and management of Kubernetes infrastructure on multi-cloud environments. By streamlining the learning process, OpenCP makes it accessible for companies to manage their Kubernetes infrastructure in multi-cloud environments.

Dinesh and Saiyam announcing OpenCP

“The launch of OpenCP represents our continued commitment to putting the needs of developers first. We believe that the industry has for too long failed developers, pursuing siloed efforts to build up tools and functionality in their own isolated ecosystem rather than thinking about what’s best for their users,” said Mark Boost when speaking with ERP.

Find out more information about OpenCP in this GitHub Repository.

Talos Linux integration

Civo users can now choose between K3s or Talos Linux when deploying a cluster!

Since the start, we have always focused on the importance of developer needs surrounding the speed of deployment and the economy of resources. Through the implementation of Talos Linux, we aim to further this approach by adopting a highly secure, API-managed infrastructure with automated and scalable operations.

In our latest blog, Sayanta Banerjee outlined what Talos Linux is, along with its features and advantages. This blog also discussed how it differs from K3s and other Linux distributions.

Edge computing

During the event, we displayed one of our high density OpenCompute racks on stage to demonstrate the power and simplicity of Civo for Edge scenarios. Josh Mesout explained how “edge computing is all about providing new flexible pathways to cloud adoption, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud,” which will allow users to easily manage and interact with Kubernetes using Civo's web interface, API, CLI, and industry-standard automation tools, such as Terraform, Pulumi, and Crossplane.

“Civo also announced a new on-premise option called CivoStack at the Edge,” explained Loraine Lawson in an article from The New Stack, “It will be shipped to end-user companies for on-premise use and will incorporate security, be available in multiple sizes and provide automated atomic backups, which means it will continue a backup if not successful the first time. It uses Role Based Access Control (RBAC) based APIs for access, and the same hardware and the simplicity of Civo’s public cloud, Majrekar added.”

Civo private region at Civo Navigate

If you’re looking for more information on how you can get fast and secure Kubernetes at the edge, check out these resources:

Sessions and demos

With over 50 speakers across a two-day event, attendees could learn about anything from machine learning to the secret ingredients to building a thriving company culture. Some of the sessions included:

  • Learn to hack - Discover a pen tester's secret weapons by Oliver Pinson-Roxburugh
  • Docker 101 in 2023 by Bret Fisher
  • The Future Skills People Need to Succeed in Tech by Tameika Reed
  • Is Kubernetes Too Complicated? by Julia Furst
  • How To Build A Production Ready Kubernetes by Engin Diri

When speaking about their experience at Civo Navigate, Kai Hoffman, Developer Advocate at Civo said:

“I loved seeing the breadth of experience and backgrounds of attendees. Navigate had sessions for people who did not have previous hands-on experience with cloud native concepts or things like infrastructure as code, but also explorations of complex business security problems for people with experience of huge scale operations. It seemed to me each talk found its audience in the seriously excellent Armature Works venue. As always with events, the networking and serendipitous discoveries outside the sessions will prove the seeds of cool projects and collaborations in the future.”

In a blog written by Engin Diri, “Sun, Tech and Community: My Experiences at Civo Navigate”, he outlined how “Civo Navigate was an awesome and fresh event and conference! I start to enjoy these smaller conferences more than the big flagship conferences I normally visit! The mixture of speakers was very good and you had the chance to create your own tailored agenda towards your interests!”

Over the next few weeks, we will be uploading all sessions from Civo Navigate onto our YouTube channel!

Final thoughts

With this being said, we can’t wait to do this again and look forward to welcoming you all back to Civo Navigate in London later this year (more information to come)!

Find some of our favorite blogs from around the web on Civo Navigate here: