Solving Infrastructure Challenges: Real Use Cases in On-Prem, Bare Metal, and Hybrid Environments

Bridging the gap between cloud agility and bare metal performance has always been a delicate dance of stakeholder priorities, time, and money. From the beginning, Cycle set out to be one of the best Kubernetes alternatives. We empower users, giving them autonomy to make crucial infrastructure decisions, instead of locking them into the control of hyperscalars or getting lost in bloated ecosystems. Now as we shift into more than just a container orchestration platform, our commitment to empowering users hasn't changed, but our users' capabilities have expanded dramatically.

We are now a compute platform, a DevOps platform, a Kubernetes alternative, and a VMware alternative, - all in one. When you boil it down, our users bring raw compute from any source, and we provide tools to scale, manage, and secure their products appropriately.

What led us here?

Over the last few weeks, we have released a number of key features. These unlock new capabilities for those who would previously piece together a number of providers and tools into a stack to accomplish a single objective. To build a great product for their customers and meet key business requirements. Because at the end of the day, most teams are prioritizing their product and features, not just their DevOps process.

Two of the most important features we released are VM support and Virtual Providers. You can read more about the release here. TL;DR: Run containers and VMs side by side, on the same network, from bare metal in Toronto to a VM in London.

So who really cares?

Our users. In the few weeks since our initial release, a number of customers have started using these new features, and we thought it would be valuable to point out some of the more interesting use cases we've seen so far!

Bare Metal

Vultr (Native integration)

Vultr is a Cycle native cloud partner. They also offer Vultr Bare Metal, which gives you full access to dedicated physical servers — no virtualization layer, no shared resources, and no noisy neighbors.

We've had a number of customers turn to the Vultr Bare Metal offering for more compute horsepower and the ease of integration within their Cycle environments.

Key features:

• Dedicated single-tenant hardware with your choice of AMD or Intel CPUs
• Optional NVIDIA or AMD GPUs for AI, ML, or compute-heavy workloads
• Full hardware access—no hypervisor, no abstraction
• Install any custom operating system you need
• Automate everything via API or CLI
• Seamless integration with Vultr Block, Object, and File Storage
• Transparent, predictable pricing that scales with your needs

Hetzner

Hetzner (Custom ISO generation) Hetzner was not a native integration, but was one of the first integrations generated via Virtual Providers. For those unfamiliar, Hetzner is a German-based infrastructure provider offering high-performance bare metal servers, cloud instances, and colocation services at highly competitive prices. Known for its reliability and transparent pricing, Hetzner is popular among developers and startups looking for cost-effective, scalable hosting solutions.

In addition to being the first integration using Virtual Providers, Hetzner is gaining traction fast within the Cycle ecosystem, particularly with our European customers.

Key features:

• High-performance hardware (Intel/AMD CPUs, NVMe SSDs, ECC RAM)
• Root access and full control
• Custom ISO support
• No virtualization overhead
• Unlimited traffic (with fair use policies)

Open Metal (Custom ISO generation)

Open Metal is a cloud infrastructure provider that offers on-demand, fully automated private clouds built on OpenStack, designed for high control and performance. It combines the flexibility of public cloud with the security and predictability of private infrastructure, ideal for DevOps, SaaS, and regulated industries.

Key features:

• On-Demand Private Clouds
• Full Infrastructure Control
• High Performance Storage
• API & Automation Ready
• Built-in Security & Compliance

On-Prem

Pure On-Prem: The Server in Your Closet

Or under your colleague's desk can now be put to use and managed in the same place your other infrastructure is running. We have several organizations who have joined multiple on-prem servers through the Virtual Provider integration. In addition most of these teams are joining Linux and Windows VMs to their Cycle environments and running them alongside containers as they look to break away from VMware.

Hybrid

80% of Cycle users are starting to adopt a Hybrid model in some way or fashion. AWS and GCP or Vultr and On-prem, the list goes on and on. With reliability issues and constant pricing increases in the headlines, it's always a good idea to hedge your bets. Regardless of your set up, our platform seamlessly supports HA environments, and should you ever need to migrate your instances to another provider or server, it's as easy as a click of a button. This includes autoscaling into other providers for times of high load.

Whats Next?

It's evident that the market is moving away from tools that add complexity, and limit flexibility. From an infrastructure perspective this means companies want infrastructure that meets them where they are.

If it's reliability that a team needs, we can connect them with the proper provider or hardware. If its cost, or performance, the proper situation can all be easily managed and consumed all within the Cycle platform. We still support hyperscalers like AWS, and GCP, but when teams are ready to break away and to cater to their specific needs, we're ready to help.

💡 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!