Civo Navigate Tampa 2023: A recap of our first tech event

5 minutes reading time

Written by

Emma Oram
Emma Oram

Digital Marketing Executive @ Civo

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.

Civo Navigate Tampa 2023 Wrap up

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.”

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).

New launches at Civo

Throughout day 1, Josh Mesout (Chief Innovation Officer), Dinesh Majrekar (CTO), and Saiyam Pathak 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.

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. 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.”

Mark Boost in an article with Computer Weekly

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.

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. 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.”

Loraine Lawson in an article from The New Stack

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 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.”

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:

Emma Oram
Emma Oram

Digital Marketing Executive @ Civo

Emma Oram is a Digital Marketing Executive at Civo, responsible for managing the company’s day-to-day digital marketing and content strategy. Her work includes overseeing blog content, thought leadership, product launch materials, and email campaigns, as well as managing social media across LinkedIn and X.

She also works closely with partners on co-marketing initiatives such as webinars, joint content, and customer case studies. In addition, Emma manages the Civo Write-For-Us program, working with external contributors and independent writers to review, edit, and publish technical tutorials and guides.

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