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The power of Kubernetes without the bloat.
The containers were never the hard part. Turning ingress, networking, infrastructure management, storage, secrets, and telemetry into something coherent is. Cycle provides all that functionality from day one.
The orchestration trade-off.
Evaluating the balance between power, maintenance, and usability.
Simplicity
Requires a steep learning curve and deep understanding of distributed systems, manifests, and cluster architecture to deploy and operate effectively.
Customizability
Offers unparalleled flexibility to tweak every scheduler, API, and networking component, though this often leads to fragile, "snowflake" configurations.
Operational Burden
Managing control planes, upgrading worker nodes, and maintaining add-on compatibility demands dedicated platform engineering teams and continuous effort.
What's in the box.
The platform is the product here. Integrated, supported, and kept current for you.
| Features & Capabilities | Cycle | DIY / Kubernetes |
|---|---|---|
Infrastructure & Compute | ||
| Bring Your Own Infrastructure (BYOI) | Yes | Yes |
| Automated OS / Kernel Updates | Yes | No Manual patching |
| Container, VM, & Serverless Support | Yes | Yes Containers, VMs with KubeVirt, WASM |
Networking & Security | ||
| Zero-Config Encrypted Mesh Network | Yes | No Requires CNI plugins |
| Automated Let's Encrypt TLS | Yes | Partial Needs cert-manager |
| Built-in Dynamic Load Balancing & WAF | Yes | Partial Requires Ingress setup |
Storage & Telemetry | ||
| Seamless Stateful Volume Migration | Yes | No Highly complex |
| Agentless Metrics, Logs & Events | Yes | No Requires Sidecars/Agents |
Developer Experience | ||
| Immutable Configuration (No Drift) | Yes | Partial only available on config maps and secrets |
| Native Two-Way SSH / Secure Console | Yes | Partial kubectl exec |
- Kubernetes Control Plane
- Container networking
- Service mesh (mTLS)
- Certificate management
- Secrets management
- Load balancing
- Observability stack
- OS & kernel patching
What you're actually paying for.
A production Kubernetes deployment is never just Kubernetes. There's the cluster, a CNI, cert-manager, an ingress controller, observability agents, and the upgrade rotation that keeps them current. Someone on your team owns every one of those.
We replace these layers of complexity with one control plane and one bill instead.
What switching looks like.
Your containers already work, so you're not starting over. Cycle runs the same standard OCI images straight from your existing registries. If you're on Compose, the Compose Converter handles your stacks in minutes, and your Kubernetes manifests get rebuilt as Cycle environments with less moving parts.
Workload Audit
Spend an hour with a Cycle engineer walking through your workloads. Determine which could move over directly, which might need rework, and which are better left alone.
Convert & Stage
You stand up your infrastructure in Cycle, using the same cloud accounts or fresh ones, deploy the converted workloads, and start pointing staging traffic at them.
Run Parallel
Both platforms run at once, so you can compare behavior, latency, and telemetry side by side on real traffic. Kubernetes keeps running the whole time, right up until you're convinced.
Cut Over
You move DNS over, and the Kubernetes bill stops.
Container images run on Cycle just like they do on Kubernetes.
Your deployment definitions get a translation. Kubernetes manifests become Cycle environments and stacks, and Compose files convert directly.
Helm charts, operators, and CRDs are Kubernetes-specific by design, so they don't come across as-is. Kubernetes functionality is mapped to a Cycle platform feature, and the audit walks through them step by step.
The add-on stack is the part of the Kubernetes bloat. You don't migrate any of it. You just stop needing it.
"We were in the middle of drafting a job post for a DevOps engineer to help manage our complex Kubernetes clusters when we decided to give Cycle a try instead. Now we're pushing over a billion hits a day, and the platform hasn't missed a beat"
Asked and answered.
What makes Cycle a Kubernetes alternative?
Cycle was built from the ground up without a single line of Docker or Kubernetes code inside. The platform is designed to simplify DevOps by offloading the complexity of control plane management, while maintaining complete ownership over compute and your workloads.
How do I manage deployments on Cycle?
Cycle can be managed from the API, our CLI (coming soon), and our Portal. Workload configurations (Stacks) can be committed to a repository and used to repeatedly deploy containers across your infrastructure.
Who handles upgrades?
The platform does. Our team pushes updates on average every 2 weeks. Security fixes, patches, and new features arrive automatically. Kernel updates simply require a restart of the host node. Read more.
How big does my team need to be to run Cycle?
That depends on the scale of your operation. Our goal is standardization of deployments, without needing to get deep into the weeds 99% of the time. Cycle empowers software engineers to deploy more easily, DevOps engineers to focus on more important issues than coordinating deployments as code is pushed, and platform engineers to focus on building what really matters.
Can I connect on-prem servers and cloud VMs at the same time?
Yes, on-prem bare-metal/VMs and cloud bare-metal/VMs can be connected as compute nodes to Cycle simultaneously. The platform will handle the underlying network connectivity.
Can Cycle run databases and stateful workloads?
Yes. Cycle supports persistent stateful volumes, including SAN and Ceph external storage. Today, the platform powers databases, persistent caches, and countless other types of stateful workloads.
Does Cycle handle autoscaling and high availability?
Yes. You can scale instances up and down based on load, spread them across servers and providers, and let the platform reschedule anything that fails. High availability is built into how environments run rather than something you wire together from separate pieces.
Can I utilize GitOps with Cycle?
Yes. Cycle pipelines allow for full automation of deployments across your infrastructure, and can be kicked off directly from a CI/CD system like Github actions.
Does Cycle support blue/green deployments?
Yes, except we call them "rainbow deployments" because you can have as many as you need. Rolling forward and backward is painless, and doesn't trigger any downtime. Learn more.
How does the cost compare to running Kubernetes?
You pay for the infrastructure you run plus the Cycle license, and that's it. The hidden cost of Kubernetes is the engineering time that goes into keeping the cluster and its add-ons healthy. Cycle takes that work off your team's plate and frees up time that can be used towards building your core product.
When is Kubernetes the better choice?
We believe Kubernetes is the better choice if you're already deeply integrated into the Kubernetes ecosystem and cannot migrate away, or if you require air-gapped deployments. Cycle requires an egress connection to function correctly (though this can be behind firewalls).