After many months of feverishly working behind the scenes, we’re beyond excited to announce that the #KUBE100 beta program is live.
What is #KUBE100?
#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.
Our intention with KUBE100 is to build a product that developers can use to quickly launch a Kubernetes cluster. Maybe it's needed for a dev environment, or to run some tests in for CI. Or maybe the developer just wants to have a play with Kubernetes to start learning about it and jump on that K8s-train!
We think that waiting 20 minutes for a cluster to launch, and paying hundreds of dollars each month for it, is too much for small dev/testing and learning environments – so hopefully KUBE100 fits that gap.
It's been a challenge to get it built, but I look forward to working with all of our KUBE100 community to improve the product with your feedback as we aim for our full launch to the public.
Why did we choose k3s?
Kubernetes is a complicated, resource-hungry beast, built for enterprise, often requiring enterprise-level resources in production.
It was always our goal to make our Kubernetes service as accessible and easy to use as possible, so using k3s was the obvious choice for us because it’s…
- Built in a single binary, making it quick to launch
- Lightweight – legacy and alpha features removed
- Cost-effective – Less than 40MB, and requires only 512MB RAM
- CNCF certified as fully Kubernetes-compliant
The need for speed
Our goal was simple; to enable customers to deploy a cluster in the quickest and easiest way possible.
This meant streamlining the Kubernetes setup flow and making launch times insanely fast – after enormous effort from the team, we've managed to get cluster launch times consistently below 2 minutes!
All you need to do is define your number of nodes and size, and select what applications from the marketplace you want to setup with your cluster.
Once set up you can easily scale up and down, configure firewall settings, and issue cluster admin access with kubeconfig.
For launch we’ve included 10 applications to the marketplace, featuring the likes of OpenFaaS, Longhorn, MariaDB and MinIO. This will grow quickly – what we add next will very much depend on the feedback we get from our community.
Get involved
#KUBE100 is a closed beta, so whilst everyone has the opportunity to apply for access, we will be vetting applications early on so we can get the best quality feedback right off the bat.
Accepted applicants will get enough free credit every month to test-drive Civo Kubernetes and get exclusive access to our community Slack channel, which will be our primary platform for gathering feedback.
Civo is a community-driven platform by developers, for developers, so we’re very keen to engage with our #KUBE100 testers right from the word go.
We'd love to hear your thoughts on #KUBE100 and what you'd like to see, whether you're in the beta or not, so let us know on twitter @CivoCloud.
