Building and managing hybrid cloud infrastructure is an increasingly common requirement for engineering teams. Some companies want to cut hyperscaler costs. Others have business continuity requirements that mean spreading infrastructure across several providers. Either way, more teams are taking hybrid cloud management into their own hands. However, as those who have attempted to solve this challenge know, many of the benefits of staying with one cloud provider are not easily replaced in a hybrid or multicloud environment. Instead, they face more overhead and rising costs.
Whether you are looking to build a hybrid cloud with on-prem bare metal, or looking to become multicloud across hyperscalers, Cycle can support your journey.
Hybrid infrastructure challenges
Using multiple cloud providers or setting up a hybrid infrastructure with a mix of on-prem and cloud, usually leads to more work for internal teams, because the operational complexity is far higher. Developers spend valuable time solving or preventing infrastructure issues instead of building the product.
The challenges are understandable. On cloud, the initial setup has to be done multiple times, once for each provider. Each provider also has its own networking model, IAM system, APIs and way of interacting with them, and each needs to be kept up to date with security patches and updates. With every additional provider, it becomes increasingly hard for teams to have the deep expertise needed for all the cloud platforms in use. On top of that, deployment and release tooling that teams have built themselves also needs to be kept up to date.
When teams weigh the pros and cons, many stay with one provider because they can't justify the investment needed.
Unnecessary layers built to solve the challenge
Larger organizations solve these issues by investing in building a platform team and their own internal developer platform. This gives developers a standard interface and hides the complexity of multiple providers from them.
Many teams use tools like Kubernetes to create a unified API and interface for applications to deploy to. But Kubernetes comes with a massive amount of operational overhead and usually calls for dedicated resources just to maintain the Kubernetes clusters.
Whichever route teams take, cost and complexity escalate quickly.
Looking for a Kubernetes alternative?
One control plane brings a unified interface
Cycle abstracts all of that by creating a unified interface for deployment tooling, application artifacts, or Docker containers. Cycle does so without the operational or organizational overhead of a dedicated platform team. With Cycle, provisioning infrastructure, configuring the networks, setting up network interconnections, patching, and more is all taken care of. It all happens automatically, regardless of provider, whether you work in the portal, through the API, in code, or via Cycle’s hosted MCP server.
Here is how Cycle handles hybrid and multicloud setups. To utilize multiple providers in Cycle, all you need to do is configure them in your hub, often requiring something as simple as an API key. Cycle automatically handles the networking and configuration. When adding a new server, simply choose from the list of configured providers; Cycle requests it from the provider and takes care of all setup. The server boots Cycle OS into memory, connects to the hub, and registers as available compute.
You can then run virtual machines, containers, or functions on it. Cycle can also host and manage your DNS zones (optional) and includes a built-in load balancer. When you set up an environment on a Cycle cluster, the platform configures all required network interconnects, load balancing, discovery, and scheduling services so your nodes and workloads work together seamlessly across providers. If you need to move an instance to a different server, you can migrate it and Cycle automatically reconnects the network, even for stateful services moving between compute providers. Stacks allow you to use infrastructure as code to create reproducible units of one or more services complete with configuration, regardless of destination provider. Unlike Terraform, which requires provider-specific configurations, Stacks provide a unified interface for all your deployments.
Check out our documentation to see what else Cycle is capable of doing.
Cycle.io has been a game-changer for our team. Instead of managing Kubernetes clusters and DevOps infrastructure, we now focus 100% on what really matters: building product and delivering value to customers. By eliminating endless infrastructure overhead, we’re saving both time and money and investing those savings back into product innovation, not DevOps fire-fighting.
The key to hybrid and multicloud deployments
Hybrid and multicloud management doesn't have to mean building a large DevOps team or wrangling complex Kubernetes setups. Cycle's unified control plane simplifies that layer. You get the benefits of hybrid and multicloud infrastructure, and the power of a DevOps team, without spending the time and money to build it in house.