July 9th, 2024 - Matt Krauser, Strategic Sales Executive

Three Common Ways Cycle Pays for Itself

In today's competitive and uncertain tech landscape, engineering organizations are constantly seeking ways to optimize costs without compromising on performance. Efficient resource management and cost reduction have become crucial for businesses aiming to stay alive and ahead.

At Cycle, our goal is to offer a robust solution that enhances efficiency while delivering significant cost savings to our users. Our platform simplifies complex infrastructure management, automates routine DevOps tasks, and streamlines container orchestration. This enables our users to focus on their core business objectives while enjoying substantial cost savings.

Let's dive into three compelling ways Cycle not only saves our customers time and money, but ultimately pays for itself.

1. Reduction in DevOps Costs Through Automation

As companies grow and scale, the need for DevOps expertise becomes crucial. However, hiring skilled DevOps talent can be expensive and often out of reach for many businesses. Cycle bridges this gap by automating maintenance tasks, simplifying infrastructure management, and standardizing container orchestration. Having these pieces in place can dramatically reduce the burden on the organizations DevOps team, allowing them to focus on strategic initiatives that drive business forward. By handling the mundane but necessary tasks, Cycle ensures that DevOps teams are utilized efficiently, saving both time and money.

Following Quibitro's switch from Kubernetes, Founder & CEO Beray Benteson said:

“Not only did we save on cost, but the time saved was even more critical for our small team. Essentially, Cycle became our DevOps team, allowing us to focus on growth and delivery.”

It's also worth mentioning that the cost of Cycle's business tier is comparable to that of a single DevOps engineer, making it a great choice for those who don't wish to hire more expert help.

By reducing the need for a dedicated DevOps team, or at least allowing that team to focus on the things that matter most, Cycle not only cuts down on labor costs but also increases the efficiency and productivity of the organizations engineers.

2. Reduction in Infrastructure Expenses Through Increased Density and Utilization

Infrastructure and service costs are significant concerns for all businesses, regardless of their size. These costs can quickly add up, impacting the bottom line. Optimizing infrastructure usage and reducing unnecessary service expenditures are crucial for financial wellbeing. At Cycle, we focus on maximizing infrastructure density, which translates to better resource utilization and significant cost savings.

The philosophy behind our emphasis on increased infrastructure density is simple: efficient resource management. Instead of deploying hundreds of small VMs for each application, Cycle leverages larger nodes to optimize performance and cost. This approach reduces the number of resources needed, leading to a more balanced and efficient infrastructure that saves money.

Our platform's dynamic allocation means resources are scaled up or down automatically based on the organizations specific demands. By pooling resources across different nodes and using our intelligent scheduler to ensure workloads land in the right place, we eliminate the issue of overworked nodes sitting next to underutilized ones.

For instance, Casey Dement, Head of Engineering at Busify, shared his experience:

“The overwhelming cost savings was the simplicity of evaluating our actual usage and re-provisioning our infrastructure to right-size the hardware we were using. I could have made those same changes in AWS, but the complexity of making those changes in AWS created a 'too delicate to mess with' situation where those changes became impractical. But once we migrated to Cycle, making those kinds of changes became trivial. That is where the bulk of our ~40K/yr of savings was realized.”

By focusing on infrastructure density and integrating essential services directly into our platform, Cycle helps businesses streamline their operations and reduce overall expenses. This combination of increased density and smart resource management not only cuts costs but also enhances infrastructure performance and reliability.

3. Reduction in Vendor / Technical Debt Costs Through an All-In-One Platform

In the realm of infrastructure management, dealing with multiple vendors and the technical debt that comes with it can be a daunting and expensive challenge. Each vendor comes with its own set of tools, configurations, and maintenance requirements, leading to increased complexity and costs. Cycle simplifies this by offering an all-in-one platform that reduces the need for multiple vendors and the associated technical debt.

With Cycle, there's no need for additional services like load balancers, service discovery, or VPNs. These functionalities are integrated directly into the platform, allowing organizations to eliminate the costs and complexities associated with maintaining and managing separate services. This all-in-one approach streamlines architecture, making it easier to manage and reducing the risk of vendor lock-in.

Casey from Busify elaborated on this benefit:

“With Cycle, a lot of ancillary charges like load balancers and such got eliminated. These were not trivial - on the order of several hundred dollars a month.”

By consolidating those services into one platform, Casey and his team simplified their operations and significantly cut down on costs.

Moreover, Cycle's multi-cloud approach provides flexibility and cost efficiency. Being cloud-agnostic allows the organization to easily compare pricing between cloud providers and avoid vendor lock-in. This means organizations can always shop around and ensure they're getting the best deal available on compute, further optimizing cloud spend.

By reducing the number of vendors and integrating essential services into a single platform, Cycle helps businesses manage their infrastructure more efficiently and cost-effectively. This reduction in vendor and technical debt costs allows organizations to focus more on their core business objectives while enjoying significant financial benefits.

Wrapping Up

Cycle's comprehensive platform brings tangible value by significantly cutting costs and streamlining operations. From reducing DevOps overhead through intelligent automation, optimizing infrastructure expenses via increased density and utilization, to minimizing vendor and technical debt costs through an all-in-one approach, Cycle proves itself to be a worthwhile investment. By integrating these key functionalities into a single platform, Cycle not only enhances operational efficiency but also delivers substantial cost savings, making it clear how the platform pays for itself.

We've built a detailed Cycle ROI calculator to help organizations calculate how much they could be saving from a move to Cycle.

💡 Interested in trying the Cycle platform? Create your account today! Want to drop in and have a chat with the Cycle team? We'd love to have you join our public Cycle Slack community!