GA is here
After nearly 2 years of perfecting our product during our beta phase and just over 5 months since we opened for early access, I have great pleasure in announcing that Civo is now 'General Availability'.
It's taken us over 4 years to get to where we are today, with a colossal amount of work being contributed by our team to build the Civo platform and developer eco-system.
I can honestly say that we're lucky to have so many amazing people at Civo. They continue to surprise and impress me with their dedication and enthusiasm to help Civo grow. To be a great company, you need great people and we're very fortunate to have so many.
The highlights of our journey to GA
Back in 2019 we had a vision of creating the world's first managed Kubernetes service using K3s and in August 2019 we made that a reality. The next month we launched the first iteration of the Civo KUBE100 beta, available to hand-picked developers worldwide - it was a huge success.
We attracted 5000+ developers from over 130 different countries, which allowed us to gain incredible insight and feedback to further develop and refine the platform.
Over the next 18 months we continued listen to our users to improve Civo any way we could, until the beginning of 2021 when we felt we were ready to set the wheels in motion on a plan towards our general availability launch. And what a year 2021 has been...
February 2021 - Expanded our regions with our first US region launched in New York
March 2021 - Civo Kubernetes is certified by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)
May 2021 - Civo comes out of beta and enters 'Early Access' phase at Kubecon EU
April 2021 - Raised $840k seed funding from private investors
July 2021 - Civo named one of the top 10 hottest Kubernetes start-ups by CRN
August 2021 - Civo Academy is launched, with over 50 free videos to support grassroots learning and development
September 2021 - Raised $2m funding, with strategic investment from Softbank-backed THG Ingenuity
September 2021 - New German region launched in Frankfurt
October 2021 - Civo moves into 'General Availability' at Kubecon North America
What does GA mean for our customers?
In many respects nothing will change, as since our 'Early Access' phase we've been onboarding customers who have already been using Civo in production to great success.
Some new enhancements have been made though, but these are mostly related to performance and advancing our observability stack, so we can ensure any potential issues can be identified and fixed as quickly as possible.
What's next for Civo?
Our development teams generally work in 3-month cycles, where we plan and estimate out all the work we want to achieve within that period.
A few things on our roadmap for the next period are:
- New Region - We're soon to be launching a new region in Asia.
- DBaaS - Our managed databases service will soon go into beta.
- Object Storage service - NVMe based object storage is a priority for us.
- Load Balancers - Kubernetes load balancer service is soon to be released into beta.
- GPU service - It's unlikely to launch in the next 3 months, but we're working hard on this.
- PaaS offering - We're finalising and testing our proof of concept right now.
On top of the above new products and features, we'll be continuing to improve the developer experience with smaller enhancements across a number of areas.
Final word
We recently surveyed 1,000 developers around Kubernetes adoption and by far and away the biggest challenge people faced was the steep learning curve. I believe Civo is already helping to change this, we're creating an eco-system that simplifies using Kubernetes to better support developers of all levels and improve adoption amongst companies worldwide.
Improving productivity within development teams is a key personal objective of mine. If we can help developers ship code quicker and scale out their applications with ease, then companies can grow faster. I believe simplicity and speed are the key to this.
