Recently I've had the great privilege of working on creating a distributed WordPress deployment that leverages GCP compute and services alongside containers running on the Cycle platform. This blog dives into a bit of the history of why WordPress is difficult to deploy in a distributed way, how we approached it, some really interesting things we found, and finally, the solution we put in place.

We are thrilled to announce that Cycle was named a Cool Vendor in the 2024 Gartner Cool Vendors in Container Management research. For Gartner clients, you can find the full research here. “When we started Cycle a decade ago, we knew it would be a constant battle in the war of functionality versus simplicity. While it's a challenge to build a platform that has all the features organizations want, it's even more difficult to accomplish that functionality without introducing extra complexity.

We all know that keeping a server clock "on time" is an ongoing problem that computer scientists have wrestled with for decades. Nowadays, most servers keep time using a quartz crystal oscillator that's powered by a CMOS battery. The crystal vibrates at a very precise frequency and that's how it maintains accuracy (cool right). Events like rebooting and power loss can cause the server to abandon its primary clock source and fall back to an OS-level timekeeping system.

We're excited to announce two major additions to our website that are set to make your experience using Cycle smoother and more effective: the completely revamped Documentation section, and the new Learn Center.

August has been an outstanding month for the Cycle team, marked by significant advancements across the platform. We've introduced new features aimed at simplifying workflows and enhancing user experience. As we wrap up August and look ahead to September, we're excited to share the progress we've made and what you can expect in the coming weeks.

Today we announce the launch of the Cycle Toolbox, a suite of tools that are designed to streamline the workflows of Devops professionals and developers. Our goal is to create a toolkit that not only simplifies your daily tasks but also helps alleviate some of those common frustrations. This is just the beginning, but for our initial release, we're excited to introduce the following tools.

It's not an understatement to say Dockerfiles are the underpinning of modern DevOps. Writing a simple Dockerfile that 'works' is relatively straightforward, but there are several tricks and tips that could significantly improve the build speed and efficiency of your container images. If your current Dockerfiles copy in multi gigabyte contexts, reinstall dependencies on every build, or use only a single stage, we need to talk.

July has been an exciting month for us here at Cycle! We've had our heads down, and have made significant advancements and launched a number of new features aimed at enhancing the overall experience for our users. As we transition into August, we're thrilled to share what we've accomplished during the month of July, and what lies ahead for the platform.

Welcome to the shortlist, a shallow dive into important topics meant for helping developers understand important aspects of software engineering and software culture quickly.

Bus Factor is a measure of risk to a project or organization due to the loss of key personnel. For software engineering teams, a low bus factor (meaning only a few people hold critical knowledge or skills) can lead to complications that result in product failures.