Civo Kubernetes

Civo Kubernetes is a managed Kubernetes service on K3s from UK cloud provider Civo, with a vendor-run control plane, for developers, startups and small teams.

Civo Kubernetes runs containerised applications on clusters that are ready in about 90 seconds, with Civo operating the control plane and the customer looking after the worker nodes. It is a product of Civo Ltd, the London cloud company founded in 2015, and runs on the custom-built CivoStack. Each cluster uses K3s as its default distribution and is certified conformant by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. The control plane is replicated across zones, so high availability needs no extra configuration. A cluster is built from node pools, sized from the Standard, Performance, CPU Optimized and RAM Optimized node families, and GPU nodes are available for machine learning work. The cluster autoscaler, added from the Civo Marketplace, adds a node when pending workloads cannot be placed and removes nodes as demand falls. Traefik starts as the ingress controller on new clusters, and Civo Load Balancers carry outside traffic to services. The civo-volume storage class creates a persistent volume whenever a workload claims storage, and Cilium can be picked at creation to enforce network policies. The Marketplace installs further applications, such as Istio or Linkerd, from the dashboard or the CLI. The service suits developers and small platform teams that want a production cluster without running the control plane themselves. Startups that need clusters close to their users can choose regions in the US, the UK, the EU and India, including London, Frankfurt, Mumbai and New York. AI and machine learning teams use GPU node pools for training and real-time inference. Developers learning Kubernetes can start on one small cluster and grow it pool by pool. Civo also serves research, financial services and government buyers, and offers Private Cloud and UK and India Sovereign Cloud services beside the public regions. Clusters are created and changed from the Civo dashboard, the Civo CLI, the REST API or Terraform, so a CI/CD pipeline can manage them in code. GPU node pools carry workloads written with TensorFlow or PyTorch, and stateful services keep their data on civo-volume persistent volumes. Teams that would rather not host a database in the cluster can attach Civo's managed PostgreSQL Databases, a separate service. Because every cluster passes the CNCF conformance tests, the kubectl manifests and Helm charts a team already uses on another provider's Kubernetes run on Civo clusters too.