Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Bridging the gap between cloud agility and bare metal performance has always been a delicate dance of stakeholder priorities, time, and money. From the beginning, Cycle set out to be one of the best Kubernetes alternatives. We empower users, giving them autonomy to make crucial infrastructure decisions, instead of locking them into the control of hyperscalars or getting lost in bloated ecosystems.

If you’ve worked with Kubernetes, you know logs are essential for understanding what’s happening inside your clusters. However, unlike traditional servers, Kubernetes logs present their unique challenges. Pods frequently start and stop, containers restart regularly, and logs stored locally can be lost quickly. Because of this, managing logs in Kubernetes requires a different approach.

You’ve probably run a lot of Docker containers, but do you know what happens behind the scenes? The Docker container lifecycle is the path a container follows from being created to running, stopping, and finally getting removed. Understanding these steps helps you figure out why a container might not start or when to restart it instead of creating a new one.

When your Kubernetes app suddenly has traffic spikes in a distant country, it can be difficult to determine why. Let’s say, for example, we have an e-commerce app that started to receive an unusual surge of visitors from Australia — something we never anticipated. We search for answers in our logs, but without geographic context, we don’t have the full insights we need.

If you’re working with containers, SBOMs or any kind of vulnerability scan, you know the drill. Every scan lights up like a Christmas tree. Critical, high, medium and low vulnerabilities. It feels that the list will always go on. The goal is always zero CVEs. And while that sounds great, it’s not realistic. They come at such a high pace, and sometimes they are really hard to resolve. Teams are spending time chasing vulnerabilities that don’t matter.

Platform engineering has emerged as the natural progression of DevOps—not a replacement as some may think, but rather more of a refinement. While DevOps broke down silos and encouraged shared responsibility, it often left teams fending for themselves across sprawling infrastructure stacks. Developers were promised autonomy, but were instead overwhelmed by the burden of managing CI/CD, security, observability, infrastructure provisioning, and more.

Containers have been with us for a while and are ubiquitous in the Secure Software Development Life Cycle (SSDLC). According to some reports, nearly 60% of organizations use containers for most or all of their production applications. It’s no surprise really, as containers provide consistency and standardization across the lifecycle while speeding up delivery pipelines. They revolutionized how we develop and deploy apps in the cloud and there is no sign of this changing anytime soon.