Civo Launches Cloud Service Based on K3s
Civo, a provider of a cloud service for applications deployed on Kubernetes clusters, this week unveiled a service based on the open source K3s distribution of Kubernetes being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
Mark Boost, Civo’s CEO, says K3s is gaining traction as a means to running workloads in a way that is both more cost effective and ultimately more sustainable from a carbon emissions perspective.
Originally developed by Rancher Labs, K3s includes everything required to install Kubernetes on any device in a single, 40MB binary. There is no requirement for an external installer such as Kubespray, Kubeadm or RKE. With a single command, a single-node K3s cluster can be provisioned or upgraded. Administrators can run a single command on any new node that points to an existing server that then passes through a secure token.
All the certificates needed to establish TLS connections between the Kubernetes masters and nodes are created automatically when a cluster is launched. Encryption keys for service accounts are also automatically created.
Civo says that over the course of the past two years it has been building a cloud service based on K3s that has already been beta tested by more than 4,000 developers. The service is available today to early adopters, with general availability expected next month. A fully usable cluster can be deployed in less than 90 seconds, says Boost. The goal is to reduce that time to less than 30 seconds, he adds.
While cloud service providers have a clear economic incentive to run workloads are efficiently as possible, pressure on IT teams to reduce carbon emissions is starting to increase. Interest in sustainability is on the rise around the globe as countries, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, provide economic incentives for organizations to reduce carbon emissions as part of their economic recovery plans. More than 1,300 organizations have also committed to a United Nations Science Based Targets (SBT) initiative to reduce absolute carbon emissions in their operations and supply chains as part of an effort to reach net-zero carbon goals by 2050. Many of those organizations will accelerate those efforts as part of marketing efforts that seek to assure their end customers they are proactively taking steps to protect the environment.
As a result of those initiatives, IT teams are being asked to reduce the amount of carbon generated by servers and storage systems running in the cloud or in an on-premises IT environment. Unfortunately, much of that infrastructure is left running when idle. There may come a day when advances in automation and artificial intelligence (AI) will make it easier to run workloads at scale in a way that ensures idle resources are powered down. In the meantime, there are now nascent efforts to train software developers to write code in a way that consumes cloud infrastructure more efficiently.
It may be a while before sustainability goals are achieved, but, starting with the next generation of cloud-native applications, it appears the way IT is managed is about to fundamentally change for the better.
