Civo’s FlexCore aims to ride the repatriation wave

Enterprises that need to worry about compliance have yet another fresh option, as Civo enters the appliance game with its FlexCore private cloud solution.

The hardware was launched this week at the company’s Navigate conference and builds on the CivoStack Enterprise Cloud software, which runs on a customer’s own hardware.

FlexCore is an appliance that can be run either in the customer’s datacenter or one of Civo’s it barn regions in London, New York or Frankfurt.

It is designed for enterprises that have specific compliance needs but don’t want the hassle of setting up CivoStack themselves. Civo CEO Mark Boost described it as a “hyperconverged design.” Although various hardware configurations are available, “you can just keep bolting on forever, infinitely.”

Boost told us the hardware is pretty much identical, albeit productized, to that used by Civo itself for its public cloud and, since it has the same features as CivoStack Enterprise, gives a customer access to services such as Kubernetes and the inevitable AI and ML applications. And yes, GPU support is also available.

Boost likened the device to a more feature-rich AWS Outpost. However, while an AWS Outpost is a pool of compute and storage capacity deployed at a customer site, the FlexCore is more a full private cloud. According to Boost, customers will see the hardware available as just one more region when deploying workloads once connected.

Pilots are ongoing and the hardware won’t become available until deeper into calendar Q4. Customers will have three options for purchasing the kit: an upfront payment, 50 percent upfront, or payments split over three years. Going upfront will offer the best price.

Though Microsoft and Amazon both have had on-premises cloud options for several years, Civo says FlexCore is fuller featured and takes a different approach to vendor lock-in – if a user wants to take their workload elsewhere, fine.

After an initial rush to the cloud, the enthusiasm has waned as the realities of compliance and governance take hold. Some organizations are taking a hard look at cloud repatriation and considering bringing some workloads and data back on-premises.

FlexCore is trying to appeal to customers unwilling to manage their own services yet are keen to swerve hyperscalers such as AWS and Microsoft. ®