Civo Navigate Europe 2023 show report
Civo used the Europe leg of its Navigate user conference series to showcase a number of announcements and platform developments.
CEO and serial entrepreneur Mark Boost took the stage in London’s ‘The Brewery’ venue to provide some opening remarks. Having last seen Boost present in Tampa for Navigate USA 2023, this actually represents the first time this event has been hosted in Europe.
Sharing a few thoughts related to the venue itself, Boost said that he chose this new-age quirky London site as it represents a kind of innovation hub – the kind of place so popular with the Gen-Z cohort. Preferring to eschew news of Civo platform updates, Boost actually gave
Some 50 speakers gathered for this event from locations all over the world. Around 12 workshops focusing on areas including Kubernetes (obviously, that’s really what Civo does) and AI and Wasm and more.
“Essentially we are a cloud provider, rather like AWS, GCP and Azure – but we’re cheaper and faster than the major hyperscalers. We believe that we should back the best of open source rather than focus on any level of proprietary technology that inevitably leads to lock-in for customers,” said Boost.
Referring to his firm’s new partnership with Deep Green, Boost detailed news of Civo working with the company to build carbon-neutral cloud services. By making use of what is known as ‘small-edge’ datacentre technology (known as a ‘digital boiler’) the computer system in question here immerses computers in mineral oil – it does this in order to capture and absorb the heat being generated, which is then passed through a heat exchanger to heat the 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,” said Mark Bjornsgaard, CEO of Deep Green,
Former Twitter GM Nick Caldwell and Marty Weiner, former CTO of Reddit then took the stage to deliver a management session.
In this non-Civo platform departure from the main event, Weiner & Caldwall presented a session on how to build company roadmaps and mission statements. Looking at how to deliver an emerging company idea covering everything from User eXperience (UX) quality to content and personalisation, the paid looked at timelines for development and looked onward to quality and perfecting delivery of products and services for the longer term.
“Direction can change in an instant, but destination should take time,” said Weiner, eluding to the way organisations should think about the way they build, evolve and grow.
Codezero
Developed by Microsoft alum Narayan Sainaney, Codezero enables users to spin up a Kubernetes cluster in under ninety seconds, then debug and test within simulated collaborative environments, creating new levels of visibility and interaction in a method they call “Omni-Dev.”
Featuring as part of this show, Codezero opened the public beta of its flagship product. This 2.0 version of the tool is designed to power the development of higher-quality code with fewer bugs and breaches.
“We’re proud to join our incredible partners at Civo in extending an invitation to the cloud-native software development community to change the way they work, forever,” said Reed Clayton, Codezero co-founder and CEO, “Simply put, we make it possible for large teams to get ‘back into garage startup mode’ where they write, test and deploy quickly – together. That’s the dream that, until today, has been like an alternate reality. We set out to fundamentally fix the broken development process for developer teams across the world, and we think we’ve done just that.”
Civo Navigate attendees were able to try Codezero’s solution firsthand during a live workshop to get hands-on with Codezero’s newly launched version 2.0.
“What we’ve built is a set of tools that allows developers to be exponentially more productive – which in turn enables companies to deploy products exponentially faster and better with fewer bugs, security breaches, and challenges in the production environment,” said co-founder and CTO Narayan Sainaney. “We look forward to letting developers join our public beta to get in and ‘experience a new dev reality.’”
Attendees were also offered a session showcasing how Codezero and Civo are helping clients to rethink and elevate how they run their developer environments.
“Codezero and Civo share a mission to deliver market-leading experiences for developers,” said Mark Boost, Civo CEO. “Developers want to work flexibly, with instant access to the resources they need to iterate and finetune a solution from testing through to production. Codezero tooling, run on Civo’s high-performance and low cost cloud service, is the realization of that vision. Our work together is quickly becoming the market benchmark, showing how developers can be empowered to focus on delivering exceptional software, no longer bogged down by high-cost, unreliable infrastructure. I am excited to see all this innovation showcased at Civo Navigate Europe.”
Civo reminds us that it is a cloud provider purely focused on Kubernetes, which today we understand to be the future-proofed, de facto standard for containerized applications.
By re-imagining cloud computing and challenging the status quo of the major cloud providers, Civo aims to remove the complexity of managing containers and delivers what CEO Boost insists is a ‘fair and transparent’ billing model.
Civo is of course not one of the major hyperscalers, but its ambitions are lofty and its British-born status and pedigree is of course a positive for those of us that remain in what’s left of the United Kingdom. Having already laid down the dates and venue for Civo Navigate USA 2024, the company is perhaps justified in some of its swagger. We continue to follow Civo’s platform and toolset developments and its preference for and adherence to core open source principles.
Civo CEO Mark Boost on stage in London this September 2023.