A Recession Is Inevitable. Are Your Cloud Deployments and Development Teams Ready?

The recent market turmoil has everyone from developers to CTOs and founders asking themselves a fundamental question “Is our cloud-deployment strategy recession proofs, and if not, how can we adapt to the new market realities?” Within enterprises of all sizes, leaders are asking hard questions, looking for ways to cut costs without negatively impacting growth. In a recent letter to founders, Y Combinator suggested that companies “plan for the worst” as startups across the globe scramble to navigate a sharp reversal after a 13-year bull run.

When the Good Times Roll It Can Be Easy to Brute-Force Your Way Forward.

When a market is in hyper-growth mode and cash is flowing, it’s easier to ignore, or at least postpone, decisions around future-proofing your service and ignoring important issues like technical debt, efficiency, and cost. If you are a technologist and spend any time on social media platforms, it is clear from conversations that many organizations have fallen into the trap of listening to the hype around certain new technologies.

A great example of this is Kubernetes. After all, Kubernetes was originally built by Google for managing some of the largest websites in existence. A decade later, Kubernetes has been open sourced and is now being “managed” by large corporations with their own interests in mind. Not exactly what small to medium size companies need, especially if they are trying to be nimble, scale fast, stay efficient, and avoid the traps of building up technical debt.

Every time I speak to someone that has been involved with Kubernetes, I get the “eye-roll”. It’s big, it’s complex, and takes a lot of effort to manage. For example, one of the many challenges with Kubernetes deployments is simply keeping it updated. A Datadog research study in 2021 reported that the most popular Kubernetes version is 17 months old. That has potential future consequences for security vulnerabilities alone.

But this issue is not just limited to Kubernetes. Some companies have shied away from the behemoth only to get burnt by other solutions. In mid-April 2022, it was acknowledged that Heroku’s GitHub private repositories, including some source code, were downloaded by a threat actor on April 9, 2022. The issue went unresolved for weeks, causing major headaches for their customer base.

Another significant issue is DevOps talent. Hiring, affordability, and retention of talented DevOps engineers has become a significant obstacle for development teams trying to move fast. In an article by Dave Fox, CEO & Founder of Focus Global Talent Solutions titled ‘DevOps “Drought” – The Truth Behind the Scarcity of DevOps Professionals’ he makes the point that “if you’re looking to hire one DevOps engineer odds are you’ll find a candidate pretty quickly – with one significant caveat: they’re probably already employed.” This issue has led to ever increasing cost to hire and retain DevOps engineers, creating opportunities for LowOps solutions.

Where Do We Go From Here?

There are certain things that can’t be compromised moving forward. Companies must keep innovating while staying future-focused and without incurring massive amounts of technical new debt. They can’t slow down for fear of being surpassed by competitors, and certainly can’t give up on quality. So how do companies address these new market realities?

For Companies Willing To Embrace Change, There Are Options.

Back in 2015, Cycle’s co-founders predicted these problems and set about creating a platform from scratch to address the growing concerns around the complexity of deploying and maintaining infrastructure. Cycle’s unified LowOps application deployment platform streamlines the process of container and infrastructure management while continuously keeping the underlying core up to date.

How Can Cycle Help Recession-Proof Your Solution?

1. Providing a greatly simplified LowOps approach that enables your engineering or DevOps team to do more with less.

In a recent survey with our customers, we’ve found that Cycle has saved our customers an average of $300,000 per year on DevOps spend. In most cases, Cycle was able to empower existing teams to work more efficiently, decreasing the need for DevOps team expansion.

2. Speeding up deployments by simplifying the process for developers, letting them focus on creating new features as opposed to getting sucked into maintenance.

By pairing infrastructure and network abstraction with automation features that take care of repetitive tasks, Cycle enables developers to get their code deployed faster.

3. Doing the heavy lifting when it comes to maintaining the platform by pushing updates every ten to fourteen days.

Not only does Cycle ensure everything is up to date, but also that companies are able to continue owning their infrastructure in the process. The result is the perfect balance between maintaining control and ownership without having to deal with the mundane and time consuming efforts in maintaining the infrastructure.

4. Making multi-cloud deployments simple and scalable that transposes across hybrid infrastructure including Virtual Machines, Bare Metal, and GPUs.

Cycle’s single-pane-of-glass approach makes multi-cloud deployment simple and consistent, regardless of infrastructure provider or type of servers being deployed.

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