Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We're thrilled to announce that Cycle's European Control Plane is now live! While a few organizations have been utilizing it over the past month, we're eager to officially open access to all teams. Before diving deeper into the "why," let's clarify what a Cycle Control Plane actually is. If you visit our status page, you'll see a list of the core services powering Cycle. These services include everything from our APIs to our 'factory' build systems.

There have been TWO major kernel vulnerabilities announced this week. Copy-Fail (CVE-2026-31431) was announced on April 30th. Dirty Frag (CVE-2026-43284), also known as 'Copy Fail 2: Electric Boogaloo' announced literally hours ago. Both have already been patched on Cycle, and our users can receive this update simply by restarting their nodes. The Linux patch was released less than an two hours ago, and we're the first to get it to our customers.

It is easier than ever to launch a product from scratch. Today, AI can make your team of two feel like a team of ten almost overnight. Enterprises across the tech industry are completely restructuring engineering teams to double down on AI coding, often incentivizing engineers for the sheer amount of code they push. The AI revolution is incredible. So, you would be crazy not to hop on the vibe coding train right? Well it depends on what exactly you are building.

Sources: G2 reviews, vendor documentation, 2026 market data. Docker's release in 2013 made Linux namespaces and cgroups accessible without deep kernel expertise, and container adoption took off fast. The value was clear: one portable unit with everything the process needs, running consistently across any host. Teams that were previously shipping VMs with bundled OS, runtime, and application code finally had a better option, and they took it.

Bare-metal. Just reading that word might trigger a physical reaction for some of us. Dusty closets, old server rooms, and loud rigs that never seemed to work quite right. Remember waiting days for IT to provision a server, only to realize your ticket got lost in the shuffle? Or the classic "well, it worked on my machine" excuse right before a production push? Ah, the good old days.

In the last few months we've made some changes to VMs that finally allow installing and running Windows on them. MS Paint on Cycle is finally a reality. To make Windows VMs work, we had to add a few things to the platform to support it. As always with Windows, there are some quirks, gotchas, and pain points. But in the guide below, I'll show you how we solved these issues in our recent platform update, and how to install and run a Windows Server 2025 VM on Cycle with full network connectivity.

Managing TLS certificates at scale is one of those operational tasks that starts simple and quickly grows into a sprawling problem. As organizations adopt microservices, multi-tenant architectures, and globally distributed load balancers, the number of domains and subdomains they support can expand dramatically. Each certificate then requires its own lifecycle management: Wildcard certificates offer a powerful solution to this growing complexity.

One of the best parts of my job is helping Cycle users explore self-hosting options on the platform. This time, I had the pleasure of working with Dgraph (now a part of Hypermode). If you haven't heard of it, Dgraph is a distributed, horizontally scalable graph database that gives you a native graph storage/compute engine with distributed ACID transactions (via Raft and snapshot isolation) and first-class GraphQL.

With the tech world once again in the midst of a major shift, a new group of contenders has entered the market, offering capabilities the traditional hyperscalers can’t match. Often dubbed "neoclouds", these new providers range from developer-focused platforms to GPU-centric infrastructure clouds. Can these new clouds compete with 100 billion dollar incumbents in a space that's already changing at breakneck speed?

Outages don't care how many zones you have. Power failures, software updates, and backbone disruptions all have one thing in common: they do not respect architecture diagrams. Redundancy only works if it is designed at the correct layer. Every team believes they are covered, and yet, when something breaks, the failure reveals that what looked like protection was only an illusion.