Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

For a long time, public cloud has been the default answer to scaling infrastructure, but it's not the only path forward. As more teams weigh the risks of vendor lock-in, data residency, and dependence on US-based providers, the conversation around private cloud has taken on new urgency. However, building on private infrastructure doesn't have to mean sacrificing flexibility.

The race on AI is heating up; the next generation of vibe coders and prompt engineers are entering the job market as we speak, and AI is the hottest line item on most IT budgets this year. Building the next great home automation software or adaptive learning platform with cutting-edge machine learning is great and all, but like all great software, it needs to start with the plumbing.