Hello everyone, I’m Saiyam – amongst other things I’m a CNCF Ambassador, an Influx ACE, and as of the last few weeks, now Director of Technical Evangelism here at Civo.
With Civo being a fast-paced start-up in an even faster moving industry, everyone here has a “all-hands-on deck” approach and wears many hats. My role is no exception. One of the early tasks that I am getting to grips with (in line with our focus on community) is revamping our suggestions section.
Community has always been one of Civo’s absolute core values, so there has been a significant amount of effort into creating a suggestions page so our users can suggest and vote on the features for us to build next. So, I had multiple discussions with the team regarding the suggestions submitted to date, on which ones to focus, and which align with the internal roadmap for our new platform.
The Civo roadmap for 2021
After reviewing all of the community-generated suggestions, analysing the feedback from our recent survey, and speaking with colleagues, Civo ambassadors and our users over the last few weeks, we have developed a roadmap which is entirely community-driven.
Just some of our community generated suggestionsWhilst our core focus right now is the on-going work to develop the new Civo platform, we understand there are still many areas where we can improve the service before we come out of beta. So here is what we’re building in the coming months – as requested by you.
High Availability
For any production-ready scenario it becomes important to have an HA environment where you can always rely on the infrastructure to perform as you need it to. It’s an absolute must in order for us to be production ready.
Multi-Region
Having your app run close to where your customers are located always delivers the best results in terms of serving the application. That's where multi-region plays a very important role. This one is a no-brainer. Plans for new regions are well underway and, along with HA, is a major priority for us.
Multiple-version
We want to give the flexibility to the user to choose the Kubernetes version to run. We’ll continue to update our platform after every stable release of k3s, but also provide the option to select the previous version so that the customers can see if there are any breaking changes before they plan to migrate to the newer version.
Managed Persistent Storage Service
Personally, this is one of the most important features that I would like to highlight. We have partnered with StorageOS to offer persistent storage for our k3s clusters. Perfect for production-ready workloads when required.
k8s External DNS
External DNS synchronises exposed Kubernetes services and Ingresses with DNS providers. We have already raised a pull request with this and we’re hopeful this will be merged in the next release.
Master Backup
A must-have for any managed service: we’ll be taking care of the master backup without any extra charge to the customer. Simple.
Multiple Node Pools
Sometimes when you create the cluster and your usage grows, there comes a time when you would need specific size nodes for specific applications. So based on the deployment configuration, apps can be run on different node sizes in the same cluster.
Autoscaling
Autoscaling makes the developer life so much easier! We will be working on providing a cluster autoscaler option that will enable the cluster to add a node by itself, whenever it sees a pod in pending state due to resource constraints.
DBaaS
An often requested feature is the ability to run common databases in our infrastructure, without the hassle and knowledge needed to build a clustered solution that auto-repairs and can be easily backed up and restored. We definitely are working on this and we want to have it ready to use early 2021.
Most of the community suggestions here already align with our vision of making the best possible Kubernetes platform for all. These new features along with the reliability and speed of the new platform we’re building makes it an exciting time to be involved with Civo!
What does this mean for the community now?
We want you to get more involved in our suggestions and the future of Civo. Add new features and ideas, vote and comment on existing ones. It’s a very transparent process that should hopefully mean the important stuff gets built first and fastest.
What do I want from the community?
As you’re the ones providing us with the feedback and ideas to help us achieve our goals of become the best dev-focussed Kubernetes solution, I want you all to be rewarded for your efforts.
If you’re a particularly active and helpful member of the community, enquire about our ambassadors program so you can get the recognition you deserve – not to mention exclusive swag and early access to new features.
Plus, keep contributing to the marketplace to make the life of your fellow community members that bit easier.
What’s next for me?
Along with revamping the suggestions area and defining the roadmap for the platform, I am also working on the Civo Marketplace and making it more accessible to the community.
As I mentioned before, all this makes it an exciting time to be at Civo and I’m looking forward to taking up these challenges and being a part of the team.
I can’t give anything away right now, but I’m also currently working on creating something very special for the community which I have to keep under wraps (but I know you’re all going to love it ). Keep your eyes peeled on Twitter and our Slack community for news.
As a user-driven organisation, it is vital for us to listen to what you are saying and try to address community needs. With this, I want to end the post by saying that I am thrilled to join Civo as Director of Technical Evangelism and I look forward to continually shaping our platform to be the best possible Kubernetes solution for you.
