Cycle

What Cycle is

Cycle is a control plane for provisioning infrastructure and deploying containers, virtual machines, and functions across providers. It brings cloud, on-premises, and bare-metal infrastructure into one system, with load balancing, DNS, automatic node discovery, and isolated environment networks. The platform provides telemetry without configuration, real-time logs, and integrated metrics and events. Teams can create repeatable deployment workflows with Cycle Pipelines or its API. Listed integrations include AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Cherry Servers, Vultr, Backblaze B2, Let’s Encrypt, Depot, and GitHub Actions. Cycle supports infrastructure provisioning, governance policies, infrastructure as code, role-based access control, and audit logs; Kubernetes management is not supported. Its security information says sensitive data is encrypted at rest and credentials are injected at runtime, and its site states that a SOC 2 Type 1 report is available. Support is included on every plan, with direct access to the engineering team. Plans start at $500 a month, and the first month is covered for a trial. Customers provide their own infrastructure and pay providers separately for compute and bandwidth.

Who it suits

Cycle suits developers, DevOps engineers, and infrastructure teams managing deployments across cloud, on-premises, or bare-metal environments. It is relevant to teams seeking a single control plane for those environments.

Limits

The Lite plan allows 4 servers, 4 team members, 100GB of image storage, 7 days of metric retention, and 24 hours of metric downsampling. Standard allows 15 servers, 10 team members, 500GB of image storage, 30 days of metric retention, and 3 days of downsampling; plans limit servers rather than container or virtual-machine counts.

Getting started

1. Open the Cycle website at cycle.io
2. Start the 30-day trial covering the first month
3. Choose web, API, or self-hosted access
4. Connect supported cloud, on-premises, or bare-metal infrastructure
5. Use Cycle Pipelines or the API to create deployment workflows

Verdict

Cycle brings infrastructure provisioning, deployment, networking, and observability together across multiple infrastructure types. Account for both the platform plan and separate provider charges, and note that server counts are limited by plan.