How We Built a Cloud On K3s: The Learnings Of Growing Up Fast

Civo built a cloud computing company around K3s, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution, and shares their learnings of growing up fast in collaboration with the open-source community. They were able to iterate on K3s quickly and scale it up without traditional Kubernetes challenges, resulting in sub-90 second launch times.

• Civo is a managed Kubernetes provider based on K3s, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution
• K3s reduces installation complexity and comes packed as a single binary
• Civo is highly community-focused and community-driven
• Civo's platform provides several different options to allow for community feedback and community-created resources
• Civo was able to iterate on K3s quickly and scale it up without traditional Kubernetes challenges
• Civo promises sub-90 second launch times with sub-60 seconds becoming tantalizingly close

Civo had to rebuild server racks and found nuances in K3s while running hundreds of micro-clusters, but they were able to make clusters resilient within a multi-tenant environment and scale their company culture with the tech and community to support it.

K3s has radically altered the way we think about interacting with Kubernetes by reducing operational knowledge to an API. This promotes a highly compelling experience through its simplicity and speed. At Civo, we have spent the past two years building an ethical cloud computing company around this technology in collaboration with the open-source community. But the journey has been hard... Running hundreds of micro-clusters has had a steep learning curve. Observability, production support and reliability have been dramatically scaled and tested as services have become popular. We have found nuances in K3s, changes within the hardware requirements and had to rebuild server racks. This talk will illustrate our journey of making clusters resilient within a multi-tenant environment and how company culture had to scale with the tech and community to support it.