Cycloid calls itself a “sustainable platform engineering” company, perhaps because the company was founded on a mission to promote the optimization of infrastructure and software delivery processes in organizations. The company has now ,introduced a new service known as Components. This is a management layer designed to enable a modular and structured approach to managing cloud resources within the Cycloid engineering platform.
Not only does Cycloid align itself towards sustainable platform engineering practices, it also champions the principles of “digital sobriety” i.e. GreenOps methodologies designed to reduce the environmental impact of technology by optimising and limiting its use across the IT lifecycle to extend the lifespan of equipment and reduce energy consumption.
The somewhat generically-named Components is part of the company’s platform, which as a whole is designed to improve governance, scalability and automation for DevOps-centric Platform Engineering teams (DevPlatEngOps perhaps?) who are currently deploying and managing applications across hybrid multi-cloud environments.
All well and good then, but is there a justification and validation for this type of technology?
Managing multiple microservices
Cycloid reminds us that managing applications composed of multiple microservices (often across a range of different cloud platforms) helps organisations distribute workloads and avoid risks associated with vendor lock-in and potential service outages.
However, that infrastructure proposition is efficient, but obviously very complex… and from complexity comes system management resource cost, so (in many scenarios of this kind) it becomes counterintuitive and cost-prohibitive to work with complex deployments. This approach requires creating separate projects for each service which leads to fragmented management and challenges around maintaining a unified view of infrastructure.
Decoupling stacks from racks
Cycloid says its Components offering delivers a streamlined way for teams to organize and manage applications more efficiently. By decoupling stacks from projects, Components allows a project to contain multiple, distinct components, each linked to a specific environment and stack.
Using StackForms – Cycloid’s predefined, easy-to-use way of provisioning a complete environment without needing to code or understand the services behind the stack – the new management layer streamlines promises to resource deployment and enables the integration of cloud resources with other components.
“Platform engineering offers a path towards sustainable, scalable cloud consumption and more efficient processes. Our mission is to give the teams of the future access to the platform capabilities that can make this a reality,” said Benjamin Brial, founder of Cycloid. “With the launch of Components, we’re simplifying management for users and enhancing visibility into deployments across applications, alongside resource usage and costs. With Components, teams can focus on building and deploying services instead of managing complex project structures.”
Automated GitOps-driven pipelines
With Cycloid InfraView, the new architecture brings a centralised view of an entire application, which enables infrastructure to be visualised instantly to provide insights into deployed cloud resources. The use of automated GitOps-driven pipelines reduces manual overheads and users can maintain complete control over infrastructure with fine-grain RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) to ensure the right teams access the right resources.
The launch of Components follows recent news that Cycloid has raised €5 million Series A financing to capture global demand for its engineering platform. While the funding is of arguably little interest to technology practitioners, it does perhaps serve to highlight not just the popularity of platform engineering (we already know that the Cloud Native Computing Foundation will talk of little else this year – and dedicated tech trade press websites are springing up to focus on this practice), but the potential to use platform engineering as a base for more sustainable computing that runs in line with GreenOps and related FinOps concerns.