Civo Navigate Europe 2023 wrap up
Written by
Digital Marketing Executive @ Civo
Written by
Digital Marketing Executive @ Civo
Navigate Europe 2023 has come to an end, and we couldn’t be more grateful for everyone involved in this, from our sponsors, attendees, and most importantly, the Civo team.
Whilst we have already announced the next event for next year in Austin, Texas, we want to spend some time reflecting on the amazing few days we’ve just had, and everything we took away from it.
Day 1: Keynote sessions
Opening keynote
Nigel Poulton (Kubernetes, Docker, and WASM trainer) showed us exactly how you kick off a conference with an amazing opening speech, ramping up the excitement for the upcoming two-day event before we got to hear from our CEO Mark Boost, telling the story of Civo and why we chose The Brewery to host this year's event.
It was a packed first day with over 40 talks and workshops on a range of topics, such as security, WASM, community, and sustainability. We also had the chance to announce new product launches and hear from renowned speakers, including Kim McMahon, Francesco Ciulla, Sal Kimmich, and Marino Wijay.
Keynote session with Marty Weiner and Nick Caldwell
Kicking off the event on Tuesday morning, Marty Weiner and Nick Caldwell spent time discussing their previous adventures at companies such as Twitter, Reddit, and Pinterest, before outlining how they took start-ups like Reddit and scaled them from 30 employees to over 2,000, and ready for an IPO.
They went on to explain how they used 5 steps to scale Reddit. The 5 steps Marty Weiner and Nick Caldwell used to help build Reddit are, mission and vision, setting objectives, measuring results, organization structure, and execution.
This started with a pivotal lesson on mission, whereby they outlined how for any organization to thrive, it's imperative that every member understands their role and how they fit into the larger picture. For objectives and key results, they emphasized the importance of roadmapping, which is essentially a promise to address issues rather than just building features. Finishing off their 5 steps, they touched upon the intricacies of organizational structure. As teams grow, competition for resources intensifies, leading to the emergence of dependencies. When a company crosses the 50-employee mark, it often starts forming specialized groups based on customer problems or products. Building an organizational chart for such a company involves three steps: identifying product pillars, establishing the foundation and roof, and defining sub-teams.
One of our favorite quotes from their talk was,“Go fast, but remember the human. People are the most valuable part of your organization and the best part of being a manager!”
Sustainability panel
We were joined by Amanda Brock from OpenUK to host an engrossing panel discussion on sustainability in the cloud native space. This panel consisted of Dinesh Majrekar (CTO at Civo), Mark Bjornsgaard (CEO at Deep Green), John Ridd (CEO at Greenpixie), and Chris Jordan (Chief Technology Officer at Heata). Throughout this session, they delved into key topics such as environmental impact, technological innovation, policy influence, and industry transparency.
Product launch
Dinesh Majrekar, Saiyam Pathak, and Josh Mesout (Chief Innovation Officer at Civo) took to the stage to discuss the upcoming projects we have been working on at Civo and detail our recent partnerships with DeepGreen and Fermyon.
DeepGreen x Civo partnership
After giving a brief overview of what Civo already has to offer, Dinesh introduced our new partnership with DeepGreen that will allow those using Civo to run their cloud workloads on Deep Green’s carbon neutral servers.
Mark Bjornsgaard, CEO of Deep Green, spoke more about the importance of this partnership by saying, “Datacenters currently produce 3% of global emissions. To combat the problem, Deep Green captures 90% of the heat produced by servers and puts it to good use by using it to provide free hot water. Deep Green’s solution reduces energy bills and environmental costs for organizations that require significant amounts of heat, such as swimming pools, food manufacturers and textile firms amongst many.”
This partnership focuses on creating cleaner cloud computing and allowing us to move towards a sustainable and net-zero future. It also gives Deep Green consistent workloads to generate zero-carbon heat to power communities around the UK.
The Civo Machine Learning product range
Since our last Navigate event, we have been able to significantly improve our Civo ML products due to our closed Beta that has allowed us to make improvements to the service ahead of GA. We have moved our Kubeflow as a Service to Beta, providing users with an incredibly low entry point with no Kubernetes or Machine Learning expertise necessary. Our GPU clusters also launched at the event, with Josh Mesout talking about how we can manage your scale, giving you seamless integration into existing ways of working.
The real focus of this ML update surrounded Civo Recite, our new lightning-fast audio-to-text transcription service that currently transcribes over 50 languages at an unparalleled high speed.
While confidential containers are becoming a staple of many cloud based workloads, there are two key issues that exist with the way Kubernetes control planes are being deployed. Firstly, the isolation between each cluster's managed control plane, is at a container level, and there is no way a customer can attest to or ensure the components that have been deployed. As most recent security breaches have been at this management layer, Civo have been working on ways to add additional security for our customers.
Announced at Navigate, the team showed 3 key components of the Control Plane that could be run within an Intel Secure Enclave utilizing SGX (Software Guard Extensions). This technology allows for hardware based segregation of these management components, but will also allow customers to independently confirm (attest) that the services are unmodified kubernetes versions.
In the future, the team is going to keep working on this with an end goal of having the entire OS running inside an enclave. A hard challenge to solve but one that will ensure the highest level of Security for a managed kubernetes platform.
Emerging tech fireside chat
Sophia McKee (COO at Civo) hosted a panel discussion with Jo Drake (CIO at THG) and Dinesh Majrekar on the transformative impact of emerging technologies on businesses and organizations. This talk tackled some of the critical questions facing today’s technology leaders.
WebAssembly (WASM)
WebAssembly received an incredible amount of interest during the event, especially on Day 1, with 4 talks focused all on WASM. David Flanagan (Rawkode Academy) spoke about Server-side WASM with Spin, Ashwin Kumar Uppala (GitHub) spoke about the next generation’s perspective of WASM, Charlie Egan (Styra) outlined running policy in hard-to-reach places with WASM and OPA, and Danielle Lancashire (Fermyon) introduced the open source Fermyon Spin runtime.
On top of this, Saiyam Pathak and Matt Butcher (CEO of Fermyon) gave a short demo on how WASM would look like on Civo Kubernetes where you would be able to schedule and run your WebAssembly workloads side by side of Linux containers.
Day 2: Keynote sessions
We kicked off the start of the Day 2 with our host Nigel Poulton as he prepared us with a quick rundown of the highlights from the first day before giving attendees a taste of what to expect from the rest of the event. After this point, Nigel brought Kelsey Hightower to the stage for his keynote session with Mark Boost and Dinesh Majrekar.
Keynote session with Kelsey Hightower
It was no secret Kelsey was in the house before he came onto the stage… he had already spent hours on day 1 connecting everyone in the main sponsor hall and courtyard, answering questions, giving opinions on the future of tech, and being snapped in pictures.
Opening up his keynote talk, Kelsey took some time to give an overview of his retirement and what it has been like since leaving Google. He then welcomed Mark and Dinesh to the stage, where they spent the next hour discussing everything from advice for junior devs, the biggest mistake during his career, thoughts on recent changes in the industry, and how to mentally filter the next technological hype.
Following on from this discussion, Kelsey was once again in the venue courtyard for the next few hours, sharing ideas and taking pictures with attendees. During this time, he spoke about open source licensing, his retirement, and the value of time. It was incredible to see how generous Kelsey was with his time, but we are sure that everyone would have listened to him talk for hours!
AI panel discussion
The AI Panel with Josh Mesout, Tatiana Botskina (MintyCode), Andrew Maguire (ML Lead at Netdata Cloud), Jason Grant (Sr. Account Executive at NVIDIA), and Dan Lewis (Director of Growth at Rockborne) touched upon the increasing difficulty in distinguishing between AI-generated and human content, and the immense benefits AI offers to society. It then went into the concerns about the centralization of open-source initiatives, especially around platforms like GitHub, emphasizing the importance of community-driven guidelines and decentralization.
Overall, this session looked at the importance of navigating the ethical and intellectual property challenges accompanying AI's rapid growth, aiming for a future where technology integrates harmoniously with humanity, balancing innovation with ethical and intellectual property considerations.
Open source panel
The panel consisting of Amanda Brock, Peter Zaitsev, Liz Rice, and Matt Barker took their time to outline their insights on the evolving landscape of open source. During this talk, Peter Zaitsev emphasized the adaptability of open source. He suggested that open source could be integrated with various business models, hinting at a future where open-source projects could coexist with different economic frameworks, making the ecosystem more inclusive and flexible.
Liz Rice spoke about the importance of fostering environments that encourage innovation and collaboration while valuing individual contributors. Rice also touched upon the sometimes high expectations placed on contributors and stressed the need for a balanced ecosystem that supports innovation without overburdening its members.
We also heard Matt Barker explain how the early days of open source was driven by passion and community spirit rather than business interests. He advocated for a return to these roots, emphasizing the importance of the community and the original passion that drove the growth of open source.
Sessions and workshops
With over 30 sessions on Day 2, there were a variety of topics covered, from security, community, AI, and the CNCF. Some of the sessions included:
- Container Security You Can Count On - Saiyam Pathak (Civo) and Pablo Musa (Sysdig)
- Love is Blind, But your K8s Collaborative Troubleshooting Doesn’t Have to be - Maria Ashby (Kubeshop)
- Machine Learning for Beginners - Josh Mesout (Civo)
- Securing Cloud Native and the Dark Side of the Internet - Oliver Pinson-Roxburgh (Defense.com)
- How we chartered a course to Helm’s success with CNCF - Matt Butcher (Fermyon)
When speaking about their experience at Navigate Europe, Nigel Poulton, host at the event, said:
“Civo Navigate, just wow 👏👏👏 However, despite having an amazing agenda… the best thing about Civo Navigate was the people! Attendees were some of the nicest people I've had the pleasure of spending time with. Speakers and sponsors were next-level smart and incredibly approachable. But I think the best was the Civo team. Caring. Passionate. Hard-working. Knowledgeable. Driven. Balanced. Excited. Helpful. Inclusive... Fantastic human beings and huge credit to themselves and their company. It's no surprise Civo are doing such great things with their platform!”
Community and sponsor highlights
We were joined by DevCycle, who created some amazing content at the event and even live-streamed directly from The Brewery to explain everything they got up to on Day 1. Watch the video here to hear from Mark Callen and Andrew MacLean to hear about some of their favorite talks and workshops.
After the event, we also had the chance to read back on peoples experiences. Here is a list of some of our favorite pieces:
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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