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?

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

Bret Fisher - Host
Cristi Cotovan - Editor
Beth Fisher - Producer
Matt Williams - Host
Jake Warner @ Cycle.io - Guest

(00:00) - Intro
(02:25) - Introducing the guests
(03:17) - What is Cycle?
(12:33) - Deploying and staying up to date with Cycle
(14:21) - Cycle's own OS and updates
(17:12) - Core OS vs Cycle
(22:10) - Use multiple providers with Cycle
(22:52) - Run Cycle anywhere with infrastructure abstraction layer
(24:33) - No latency requirement for the nodes
(28:28) - DNS for container-to-container resolution
(29:54) - Migration from one cloud provider to another?
(31:17) - Roll back and telemetry
(32:48) - Full-featured API
(37:12) - Cycle data volumes
(38:35) - Backups
(40:24) - Autoscaling
(43:00) - Getting started
(44:40) - Control plane and self-hosting
(44:58) - Question about moving to Reno
(45:59) - Built from revenue and angels; no VC funding

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Cycle.io LowOps container platform