Cycle.io LowOps container platform

Cycle.io LowOps container platform

Author: Bret Fisher July 14, 2023 Duration: 52:17

Bret and Matt welcome Jake Warner back to the show to talk about LowOps. What does LowOps mean? What can Cycle offer us as an alternative to Swarm and Kubernetes?

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Jake Warner is the CEO and founder of Cycle.io. And I had him on the show a few years ago when I first heard about Cycle and I wanted to get an update on their platform offering. On this show we generally talk about Docker and Kubernetes but I'm also interested in any container tooling that can help us deploy and manage container based applications. Cycles' platform is an alternative container orchestrator as a service. In fact, they go beyond what you would provide normally with a container orchestrator and they provide OS updates, networking, the container runtime, and the orchestrator all in a single offering as a way to reduce the complexity that we're typically faced with when we're deploying Kubernetes.

While I'm a fan of Docker swarm due to its simplicity, it still requires you to manage the OS underneath, to configure networking sometimes, and the feature releases have slowed down in recent years.

But I still have a soft spot for those solutions that are removing the grunt work of OS and update management and helping smaller teams get more work done. I think Cycle has the potential to do that for a lot of teams that aren't all in on the Kubernetes way, but still value the container abstraction as the way to deploy software to servers.

Live recording of the complete show from May 18, 2023 is on YouTube (Ep. #217). Includes demos.

★Topics★
Cycle.io website
@cycleplatform on YouTube


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Creators & Guests
  • (00:00) - Intro
  • (04:42) - Introducing the guests
  • (05:34) - What is Cycle?
  • (14:50) - Deploying and staying up to date with Cycle
  • (16:38) - Cycle's own OS and updates
  • (19:29) - Core OS vs Cycle
  • (24:27) - Use multiple providers with Cycle
  • (25:09) - Run Cycle anywhere with infrastructure abstraction layer
  • (26:50) - No latency requirement for the nodes
  • (30:45) - DNS for container-to-container resolution
  • (32:11) - Migration from one cloud provider to another?
  • (33:34) - Roll back and telemetry
  • (35:05) - Full-featured API
  • (39:29) - Cycle data volumes
  • (40:52) - Backups
  • (42:41) - Autoscaling
  • (45:17) - Getting started
  • (46:57) - Control plane and self-hosting
  • (47:15) - Question about moving to Reno
  • (48:16) - Built from revenue and angels; no VC funding

Bret Fisher hosts DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling alongside Nirmal Mehta, pulling conversations directly from their live audience sessions. This isn't a theoretical lecture series; it's grounded in the practical, often messy realities of building and running modern systems. Each episode digs into the specific tools and philosophies shaping infrastructure today, from the foundational elements like Docker and container orchestration with Kubernetes or Swarm to the broader cultural shifts of DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering. You'll hear discussions that span the entire software lifecycle, touching on the integration of security with DevSecOps, the automation promises of GitOps, and what "Cloud Native" truly means for development teams. The dialogue stays focused on actionable insights and real-world use cases, offering a genuine sense of what works and what doesn't in the field. For anyone navigating the container and cloud ecosystem, this podcast serves as a regular, insightful check-in with practitioners and experts, hosted by someone deeply embedded in the community. The natural, interview-driven format makes complex topics accessible, ensuring listeners come away with more than just buzzwords-they get context and clarity.
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