Reykjavík, Iceland / Reno, Nevada — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Cycle (cycle.io), the distributed control plane that lets engineering teams run distributed applications on their own infrastructure, without the operational overhead of Kubernetes, today announced the launch of its European control plane. The new offering gives organizations across Europe, and anywhere else in the world, a fully isolated deployment of the Cycle platform that operates entirely on infrastructure owned by European companies, with zero data communication back to the United States.
Since it began serving customers in 2019, Cycle has operated a North America control plane spanning the United States and Canada. The EU control plane is a completely separate, standalone system with no shared data layers or network communication between the two regions. Critically, it runs exclusively on European infrastructure providers, is managed by a newly created company and falls entirely outside the jurisdiction of the US Cloud Act.
It's worth noting that the control plane only handles orchestration, so regardless of which control plane a customer uses, Cycle never holds or accesses customer data. Their infrastructure, networks, and data remain entirely their own. The EU control plane extends this further by ensuring that even the orchestration layer itself operates under European jurisdiction.
"Our customers have always owned 100% of their infrastructure, networks, and data," said Jake Warner, co-founder and CEO of Cycle. "The EU control plane takes that commitment further — now even the orchestration layer itself can be fully within Europe, operated by our Icelandic entity. This is about giving builders genuine choice, not just reassurance."
The launch comes as demand for genuine digital sovereignty has shifted from nice-to-have to being a priority for many European enterprises and governments. Companies that previously considered their data safe on US hyperscaler infrastructure physically located in Europe (AWS in Frankfurt, Azure in Dublin, and so on) are increasingly concluding that physical location is no longer sufficient.
“We’re seeing a fundamental change in how European companies think about infrastructure risk,” Warner added. “Organizations that have built on US hyperscalers for over a decade are now actively looking to move, not just because their data is in Europe, but because they need it on infrastructure that isn”t subject to US jurisdiction.”
The EU control plane is already live and in production, with paying customers operating on it today. Cycle has formalized a partnership with Cherry Servers, a European-owned bare metal and cloud infrastructure provider, as one of the key infrastructure partners underpinning the new control plane. “Their bare metal is incredible,” Warner said.
Cycle is also working to add Cherry Servers as a native integration within the platform, which will give customers a straightforward path to deploying workloads on high-performance European bare metal — an option that has become increasingly attractive as organizations reassess the economics and risk profile of US hyperscaler dependency.
Beyond sovereignty, the EU control plane delivers three additional benefits for customers. First, Cycle’s automatic platform updates, pushed to customers with minimal operational impact, can now be scheduled relative to European time zones, keeping maintenance well outside business hours. Second, large organizations with the highest availability requirements can deploy workloads across North American and EU control planes simultaneously, providing a level of redundancy that would be unaffected by any single-region event. Third, European servers connecting to a European control plane experience substantially lower latency — as much as six times faster than routing back to North America.
Warner and his co-founder Alexander Mattoni relocated to Iceland last year, a move that reflects both personal conviction and the company’s deepening commitment to European customers. Cycle was named a Gartner Cool Vendor in 2024 and today processes more than 150 million requests per hour across its platform.
About Cycle
Cycle is the leading Kubernetes alternative for engineering teams who want to build, deploy, and manage distributed applications on their own infrastructure. The platform supports containers, virtual machines, and functions across bare metal and public cloud, providing a unified control plane without provider lock-in. Learn more at cycle.io.
Media Contact: pr@cycle.io