Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Greetings! My name is Matt Krauser and I’m a Strategic Sales Executive here at Cycle. After participating in nearly a hundred demos of the platform, I wanted to step back from my day to day grind and share a little about my experience thus far. My goal in writing this is to compare Cycle and Kubernetes, discuss the primary pain points I hear from prospects and K8s users on a daily basis, and explain how Cycle can alleviate these challenges.

The journey to selecting a container platform is a fun and exciting time in any organization. Container technology abstracts away so many problems from cloud 1.0 VM based approach, and puts engineering teams back in the distributed drivers seat. As containers continue to mature and adoption becomes ubiquitous, there are many lessons to learn and ideas to consider before inevitably choosing Cycle. Let's take a look at Cycle alongside the other types of container platforms.

What better motivation to start adopting a technology than the need to completely replace the alternative. From a world driven on limited resources like gas, coal, and oil to wind, hydro, nuclear, geothermal, and solar… we find ourselves, as a species, evolving past a first generation we envisioned as abundant, but turned sparse. Adopting IPv6 networking is another version of this same story.

In the modern web-app space, there’s been a trend going around that I like to describe as “getting back to basics”. It seems as though over the years, the tooling and complexity around building web-apps has gotten more and more complex. In that time, we’ve strayed further from browser primitives into highly abstracted and javascript-heavy solutions to solve problems our browsers solved back in the 90’s.

Multi-cloud seems like an obvious path for most organizations, but what isn’t obvious is how to implement it, especially with a DevOps centric approach. For Cycle users, multi-cloud is just something they do. It’s a native part of the platform and a standardized experience that has led to 70+% of our users consuming infrastructure from more than 1 provider.

We recently covered some of the complex decisions and architecture behind Cycle’s brand new interface. In this final installment, we’ll peer into our crystal ball and glimpse into the future of the Cycle portal. Cycle already is a production-ready DevOps platform capable of running even the most demanding websites and applications. But, that doesn’t mean we can’t make the platform even more functional, and make DevOps even simpler to manage.

The report is so absurd and naive that it makes no sense to critique it in detail. - Kent Beck responding to the McKinsey Report. Luckily this was a hollow threat, because a few days later he and fellow blogger Gergely Orosz released a two part blog series critiquing not exactly Mckinsey's report but... any report that tried to put “effort based” metrics at the top of the list for things to track.

RabbitMQ is a messaging broker that helps different parts of a software application communicate with each other. Think of it as a middleman that takes care of sending and receiving messages so that everything runs smoothly. Since its release in 2007, it's gained a lot of traction for being reliable and easy to scale. It's a solid choice if you're dealing with complex systems and want to make sure data gets where it needs to go.

In our last installment, we covered the myriad of new UI changes added to Cycle’s portal. In this part, we walk through five of the tough engineering choices made when developing the new interface, discussing the alternatives that were considered, and shining a light on some of the technology our engineering team utilizes today.

After a span of 5 long years, we've bid farewell to Cycle's old portal. Our engineering team has been working tirelessly over the last 10 months to bring a fresh, new interface to the platform for our users. This new design encapsulates the wealth of insights we've gained during this period. Just last week, we took the decisive step of launching it into production, and the initial feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.