On an unassuming afternoon on Wednesday the 18th September 2019, we launched a world’s first! A k3s-powered, managed Kubernetes service. We were in for a ride... Since we had been taking applications for a few weeks already, when it came to beta launch day there were no shortage of applicants. It was very encouraging to see there was plenty of buzz online already.

After many months of feverishly working behind the scenes, we’re beyond excited to announce that the #KUBE100 beta program is live. #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.

As a cloud provider and DevOps-focused company, we definitely want to practice what we preach. We see the benefits of a modern cloud native architecture, so we built our hosting of www.civo.com and api.civo.com (our application) to take full use of these modern decisions. This post describes our approach to Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) from a Chief Technical Officer's perspective.

This week Intel released a statement regarding Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS), another vulnerability in the "speculative execution" feature of modern processors. This is for HyperThreading and is the feature that allows the CPU to work out what commands will be run next, if they would affect the current running command and if not, run it on the same core.

In the words of the UFC's icon Bruce Buffer, with a 180 degree spinning announcement - "we...are...live..." and finally after a long beta period, we're ready to launch to the public as a whole. The beta period has been an excellent experience for us, and of course, a great learning curve.