We're thrilled to announce that Cycle's European Control Plane is now live! While a few organizations have been utilizing it over the past month, we're eager to officially open access to all teams.
Before diving deeper into the "why," let's clarify what a Cycle Control Plane actually is. If you visit our status page, you'll see a list of the core services powering Cycle. These services include everything from our APIs to our 'factory' build systems. Together with their respective databases, caching layers, and more, these components form a complete, stand-alone copy of our control plane.
As our client base continues to grow, a number of European businesses on Cycle have asked for a way to fully segment their workloads from North American infrastructure. Given recent geopolitical shifts in the United States, we completely understand the need for strict data sovereignty. While all organizations using Cycle already have the ability to deploy own their infrastructure, and utilize the bare metal or cloud providers of their choosing, they wanted even more control.
The European control plane delivers several meaningful improvements for teams building on Cycle:
- Data Sovereignty & Compliance – While container and application data is never sent back to Cycle, telemetry and observability metrics are aggregated at the control plane for monitoring, alerting, and auto-scaling decisions. Now, for servers connected to this new region, all observability data will remain strictly on European infrastructure.
- Reduced Latency – Previously, teams located in Europe had a slightly delayed experience compared to those in North America. Whether it was slower API calls from the portal or extra latency between server commands, the timings added up. By localizing these services, we've seen average latencies drop by more than 70%, yielding a significantly better experience for our European clients.
- Lower-Impact Updates – While Cycle updates are fully automatic and don't cause application downtime, occasionally a request into our Portal or API might fail during an update. Having a dedicated European environment allows us to stage updates for local off-hours, ensuring maintenance happens when the fewest number of teams are actively working.
Ultimately, rolling out this European Control Plane is about more than just checking a box for compliance or localization. At Cycle, our goal is to give teams an exceptional experience when building and scaling complex, highly technical products. As our clients' needs evolve, we remain committed to providing the best possible platform and building features that continue our push towards supporting a wide range of use cases.
How to Get Started
Ready to launch your workloads on our European control plane?
Existing Clients: You can now use the Control Plane selector to toggle between the North America (NA) and Europe (EU) regions. Just note that since the control planes operate independently, your Hubs can only exist on a single control plane at a time.
New to Cycle? Sign up for an account today and choose Europe as your region during the onboarding process. Want to learn more before creating an account? See a demo here.