2023: A Year to Remember

With such an eventful year of releases and development, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on all thats been accomplished this trip around the sun. Before we do that, a quick message to the users who've made this year so special.

Thank you so much for joining us on this amazing journey. It is your trust and unwavering support which has helped us grow this vision into a reality.

Top 5 Releases

Writing this article was more challenging than ever because there were so many really compelling new features that landed. Our top 5 were:

Auto Scaling

Possibly the most significant feature to land on the platform this year was auto scaling. Users can opt in to scaling containers and infrastructure through auto scaling groups (infrastructure) and configurations (containers). This is a major leap forward for users wanting to build an additional layer of flexibility into their services and those looking to optimize density and availability.

Native Load Balancer

This one was special. Cycle’s new native load balancer extends the platform in a significant way when it comes to users control over routing. It also closes the vertical stack. For years we’ve relied on HAProxy as a reliable workhorse for load balancing but it was the only piece of technology not designed and built by our team in our entire stack.

With this new native load balancer, we’re able to tie together the complete power of the platform and deliver the best experience possible to our end users. Since its open beta release, we’ve introduced a ton of additional routing configuration options including proxy, forward, cache, and match mechanics. On top of all these pieces, we’ve also worked on a first version of metrics to the platform and portal so users can now see traffic in much more granular detail.

A New Portal

Headlining the portal changes was a completely redesigned and redeveloped portal. Rebuilding the portal from the ground up allowed us to not only vastly improve UX, but also gave us a chance to work from a place where implementing changes could be done much more rapidly than before.

Alexander wrote a three part blog highlighting the decisions, challenges, and outcomes of engineering this portal. Check out part 1 here.

IPSec

Any time traffic needs to use “public” networks between servers, Cycle will create an encrypted tunnel for that traffic to pass through. That might be exciting to hear if you didn’t already know about this awesome feature, but the thing that was most exciting from my perspective in customer success was that we rolled this feature out without needing our users to make a single change.

Shared Directories

Exposing host level controls was something we’ve wanted to expand on, and this year we pushed the bar with a few different features, the biggest of which was shared directories. With shared directories, users can create server level directories that can be mounted to individual container instances on the host.

After releasing version 1 of this feature, our growing public community started adopting and the feedback loop presented us with a challenge. “How can we mount the same filesystem (take EFS (nfs4) for example) to multiple servers”? Within a few days our engineering team created and deployed an improvement to shared directories that allowed for mounting of not just EFS type filesystems, but most file systems to server(s).

Honorable Mentions

Some of the things we rolled out this year that I just have to at least mention, even if not in detail are:

• Security Activity Reporting and Graph Per Environment
• Native Support for Google Cloud Platform
• Two New Deployment Strategies (Node and Edge)
• Two New Image Source Types (OCI Registry and Bucket)
• Server Compute Console

More Than Great Tech

In the news this year you may have seen Cycle mentioned in a number of articles. Most recently it was featured in an article on the new stack: “Cycle.io: Meet the Team on a Mission to Replace Kubernetes”.

Organizations around the world are waking up to the empty promises of Kubernetes and opting into alternatives. The article dives deeper into how the Cycle platform works and when Cycle is the best fit. As more and more of these articles continue to circulate, some of our team also took it to the conference scene this year attending both SaaStr and Dockercon.

Our team had a great and productive time at both these events and look forward to the 2024 conference schedule!

Happy New Year

While we love looking back at all thats been done this year to move the platform forward, we're also looking forward to this next year of growth. There are so many things to be excited about this year with the Cycle platform.

The first release of the year will have a major update to the way users deploy their containers. The new load balancer is closer than ever to moving out of beta. The CLI open beta is just around the corner!

While more companies than ever are moving away from Kubernetes and adopting Cycle, we're highly focused on our commitment to simplicity and LowOps. Thank you all for a wonderful year and from our team to yours:

Happy New Year!!

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