5 Lessons from Cycle Competitors

Consistent with the words of Darwin, there is a "survival of the fittest" mentality in the DevOps and container orchestration ecosystem. Back in 2019, when Cycle came to market, Kubernetes was among the popular choices for managing containers and remains one of the most prominent players in the space today. Our mission from day one has been to offer the best Kubernetes alternative on the market—a goal we've succeeded in, considering that 65% of all new Cycle users are switching from K8s to our platform.

That said, many set out to accomplish our same goal, which is great for those trying to solve the ever-elusive DevOps problem, but harder for those to find a good fit. Most competitors are wrapping a shiny new UI on Kubernetes and calling it a day.

However, like many others, we welcome competition because we understand that without it, there is no innovation. When companies evaluate Cycle, I always encourage them to explore all their options—not only to recognize how great our platform is but also to ensure they find the best fit for their needs.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Software is complex, DevOps is diverse, and I'll be the first to admit not everybody is a perfect fit for Cycle. While there are a few niche use cases Cycle doesn't focus on primarily, our goal is to address the 80% use case—meaning we can solve 80% of DevOps challenges, while the rest may require solutions outside of our platform.

As you read this, my goal is to share insights from our competitors, through general research and industry anecdotes, and relate the major themes to why we built Cycle and what makes our platform a superior alternative for most teams.

Defining Our Competition

It's important to set the stage and define "The Cycle Competitor". The obvious one is Kubernetes, but beyond that, it becomes more challenging to pinpoint. There is a vast array of "DevOps tools" out there, just take a look at the CNCF landscape.

For the sake of this blog, I will define a Cycle competitor as a platform, tool, or service that focuses on DevOps - more specifically, container and application orchestration. The ability to manage infrastructure and/or integrate with tools to help with this can also be included, though that won't be the primary focus.

We have seen customers migrate from or evaluate Cycle against many competitors, but the majority of comparisons fall into four main categories: Kubernetes, ECS/EKS/GKE, and Heroku

Lessons from Our Competition

Lesson #1: Flexibility vs. Simplicity

We can credit our competitors for teaching us the importance of balancing flexibility with simplicity. By design, Kubernetes is incredibly flexible, offering thousands of options to accommodate nearly any use case. For that reason, it is one of the most widely adopted solutions on the market. However, with extreme flexibility comes extreme complexity.

We learned this lesson from those who have firsthand experience with Kubernetes. Organizations need a solution that accommodates their software's needs without drowning them in complexity. Cycle offers a middle ground. By focusing on the 80% use case, we can provide guardrails where Kubernetes leaves teams to fend for themselves.

Cycle isn't the wild west, but we've seen it all - from large AI platforms, to e-commerce software, to healthcare applications, and much more, all built on top of our platform. We can handle high-demand applications and we keep things simple in the process.

Lesson #2: Scaling Shouldn't Require Growing Your DevOps Team

Running infrastructure at scale shouldn't always require hiring new members of your DevOps team. Take a look at job boards and you'll see: Looking for K8s experts, Building DevOps team, In need of DevOps help, and it goes on and on. Not only are people building teams around a solvable issue but these hires are not cheap. The average DevOps salary in the U.S. falls between $120,000 and $140,000 per year.

We took note of this and built Cycle so that users don't need to be DevOps or K8s experts. We like to think of Cycle as an extension of your DevOps team, at a fraction of the cost. We have added extensive documentation and well as a world class customer success team to ensure Cycle gets the job done, no matter what your team brings to the table.

Lesson #3: Security and Updates Should Be Effortless

Managed Kubernetes services like ECS, EKS, and GKE promise to simplify operations, but updates and security patches aren't seamless and in some cases, neglecting them can be costly.

For example, EKS started charging customers extra fees for outdated clusters. Kubernetes clusters are notoriously behind on updates, with the latest data revealing that the average cluster is 22+ months out of date. And that's not even considering the outdated dependencies that often accompany these setups.

At Cycle, we make updates simple. We've learned that when customers receive automatic software updates and security patches, they can focus on what really matters. We've been pushing product updates every ~2 weeks for several years, and our customers receive these improvements immediately, at no extra cost.

Lesson #4: Ease of Use Without Sacrificing Power

Next, a special callout to Heroku. Historically, developers flocked to Heroku because it was simple and easy to use. As it gained a majority of its initial popularity as a Ruby on Rails platform, it tried to evolve to support more use cases, but kept its focus on staying simple.

The one-push deploy sounds great if you are building a simple application, but scaling on Heroku can be incredibly expensive and technically limited. Cycle adopted a PaaS approach similar to Heroku but with a more composable architecture for our users. Cycle also touts a bring your own infrastructure model as opposed to the "black box" model from Heroku.

To keep deployment simple at scale, Cycle offers native hybrid cloud support, autoscaling, monitoring, and a suite of other integrated services - all built directly into the platform.

Lesson #5: Cost Transparency Matters

There are hidden costs with Kubernetes. There are extra charges for extended support on EKS. Twitter is full of Heroku billing horror stories. And let's not forget the astronomical personnel costs required to manage these platforms.

The reality is that most companies don't fully understand their total cost of ownership until they're deep into the weeds.

At Cycle, our pricing is transparent and available on our website. We factor in just a few elements when right-sizing your Cycle plan, and that cost remains consistent throughout your experience with us.

No hidden costs. No need to hire an expert. We keep our pricing simple—just like the way we build software.

Wrapping Up

Cycle and its competitors are in a unique position to help companies worldwide tackle a problem that has no fixed answers or rules.

Competition drives innovation, and with each day, our platform grows stronger—and our customers grow more confident in what we're building.

They say we have two ears and one mouth for a reason—listening to the market is critical to staying relevant in an ever-changing ecosystem. Cycle will continue to evolve alongside our customers, adapting to their needs while differentiating ourselves from the competition. And thanks to our competitors, we've learned some key lessons along the way.

If you're currently using a Cycle competitor and want to see the difference for yourself, reach out today!

💡 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!