It’s been a busy week at Civo Navigate 2023.

As (arguably) the first tech conference of the year (yes, okay, don’t write in, we all have calendars and we know when CES is), the gathering of Kubernetes cloud open source software engineering purists could become a firm regular on the event circuit – especially (and we mean this part) if the company ascends to the loft ‘let’s challenge the big hyperscaler’ heights that its management board envisages.

As a company, Civo is calling itself the only pure-play cloud-native service provider and now the company has announced its new Machine Learning (ML) managed service.

The nicely named Kubeflow-as-a-Service offering promises to make life on planet Kube better for developers by reducing the resources and time required to gain insights from ML algorithms. 

Infrastructure components

The surrounding infrastructure required to support ML is of course both vast and complex. As a result, many organizations spend the majority of their time and resources dedicated to ML on setting up infrastructure components, such as process management tools, data verification and machine resource management. 

Civo aims to combat this grunt work factor by running these components as an ML managed service, supporting the tools and frameworks most required by developers using ML. 

By handling the heavy lifting, Civo will make ML accessible to organizations of all sizes. Many smaller organizations are priced out of ML due to the economies of scale required to build the surrounding operations and infrastructure. 

“Civo’s ethos of fairly priced simplicity represents a new frontier for the Machine Learning (ML) landscape. Many big tech players are focusing their effort on building tools they think developers want,” said Josh Mesout, Civo chief innovation officer.

Mesout points out that, in reality, as we know, most developers have access to the tools to perform infrastructure component management, they just want them to run more efficiently and not have to spend the majority of the time preparing the infrastructure and setting up tooling. 

An evolutionary tipping point 

“Technological landscapes, either cloud or ML, ultimately evolve when they are democratized and are easily accessible to all. We hope to provide every developer looking to use ML with the platform they require to capitalize on its benefits, and in turn, drive the technology forward,” said Mesout.

Civo appears to have come very rapidly through the initial ranks of development i.e. last year, we hadn’t heard of Civo, not really… perhaps just occasionally in passing – this year, analysts and press have assembled for the company’s (one assumes now annual) developer convention and the partner-sponsor list sports some impressive names including Loft, Dynatrace, Percona , Pantheon, DataStax and the buccaneering dudes at Tampa [Bay] Devs – ahoy me hearties, here be monsters. 

About Adrian Bridgwater

Adrian Bridgwater is a freelance journalist and corporate content creation specialist focusing on cross platform software application development as well as all related aspects software engineering, project management and technology as a whole. Adrian is a regular writer and blogger with Computer Weekly and others covering the application development landscape to detail the movers, shakers and start-ups that make the industry the vibrant place that it is. His journalistic creed is to bring forward-thinking, impartial, technology editorial to a professional (and hobbyist) software audience around the world. His mission is to objectively inform, educate and challenge - and through this champion better coding capabilities and ultimately better software engineering.