Taking CivoCloud for a Spin

For those of you haven’t heard about CivoCloud, CivoCloud is a cloud provider based out of UK specialises in providing fully managed Kubernetes Service. If I am not mistaken they are the first to launch a fully managed k3s as a service. Firstly warmest Congratulations to the team !!!

Few weeks back I signed up for their service. They launched the service around the same time as KubeCon Europe 2021. It is time to take it for a spin.

My experience taking it for a spin

Sign-up was a breeze and they are giving away a generous USD$250 credit for three months. Utilising the credits available I was able to spin-up a 3 x node cluster in less than two minutes. Please note I only selected the default deployments (metrics-server and Traefik).

Setup and getting it connected to my kubectl was a breeze. Although I did noticed that, by default all ports are open. However they do recommend changing it and even provide your public IP.

If you do ended up adding your IP to the firewall rules please ensure that the node/pod/service traffic aren’t blocked !!! Meaning please include node/pod/service CIDRs in your rules.

Please note: I was lazy to be specific as you can see, I have given full access to my public IP. Better practice is only open what you need.

After creating the Firewall rules and downloading the kubeconfig I was able to access the cluster from my kubectl with no issues.

I then used Platformer Console to deploy an application (in this instance nginx). As you know it is also super easy to connect a cluster securely to Platformer Console.

Added the application and created an Ingress via Platformer Console and the whole process took me less than 10mins from start to go.

Result

Overall experience

• Clean UI helps you to get a cluster going in matter of minutes
• Setting up firewall rules wasn’t too hard, of course once you figured that you will have to enable them for pod, service and node CIDRs as well
• Connecting to Platformer Console or other 3rd Party tools should be a breeze (as well — have not tested other tools, however assume it is not going to be hard either)
• Unfortunately deploying Marketplace applications did not work for me (not sure if this was due to my restricted firewall rules or something else)

Will certainly keep an eye on and make suggestions, provide feedback to improve the services as they progress in their journey.