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Storage, Routing, and Observability Improvements

This update ships a large batch of improvements, new features, and a few fixes. We’ve added support for zstd-compressed images, which means the new Docker hardened images are now building and running as expected. The SAN integration released earlier this year has been rebuilt on top of our External Volumes abstraction, making it more flexible and easier to extend. Readiness can now be defined directly on a container and will continue to evolve into a more powerful way to manage instance state at a granular level. We’ve also introduced hub-level encryption to strengthen security, fixed external volume usage reporting, added support for marking infrastructure clusters as essential or non-essential to keep dashboards focused, and simplified path-based routing through linked records.

• improvement

  Load Balancer Routes

  The Cycle V1 LB is now able to adjust to routing changes more efficiently, especially within environments that have 25+ public containers. In testing, this lead to a 90% reduction in most sync times.

• added

  Path Matching on LINKED Records

  Paths can now be attached directly to LINKED records to indicate that they should only route to the specified container when the inbound request is to that specific path. Using this pattern significantly reduces complexity, and the risk of misconfiguration, compared to creating router-specific path matching rules. Additionally, this method enables the use of deployment tags.

• added

  Metrics and Events On-Disk Buffer

  The compute service now creates an on-disk buffer that will be used when an event/metric cannot be sent to the platform (network outage, high load, etc). On connection reestablishment, the queued events/metrics will be submitted.

• added

  Support ztsd Compressed Images

  Images that have zstd compressed layers are now supported by Cycle's factory.

• improvement

  Rebuilt SAN Integration

  The SAN support we launched in Q3 2025 has been rebuilt into our new storage abstraction, External Volumes.

• added

  Metrics / Events Egress

  Per environment, events and metrics can now be pushed to an external endpoint.

• added

  Readiness Check

  In a container config, a readiness check can now be specified. Initially, this will just attach a ready state. A future version will utilize this for load balancer routing, DNS, and more.

• security

  Hub Level Encryption

  Behind the scenes, we've adopted a new security process where all configs, variables, and metadata are encrypted on a per-hub basis as opposed to a per-core basis.

• improvement

  Server Deploy Modal

  Improved the process of deploying infrastructure in the portal.

• added

  Uptime Chart

  Added a new chart to environment dashboards to show successful pings of the environment load balancer. This is done by a service outside of your infrastructure, showing that your load balancer is publicly accessible.

• fixed

  External Volume Usage

  External volumes (SAN, Ceph) now properly report their usage.

• added

  Non-Essential Clusters

  Clusters can now be marked as 'non-essential', removing them from metrics on the new dashboards. This is useful for keeping development or staging clusters from presenting on critical dashboards.

• added

  Resource Level Dashboards

  New dashboards have been added across the portal, showing a birds eye view of important information for environments, images, pipelines and more.

• added

  External Volume Scanning

  It's now possible to scan for Ceph or SAN volumes that are present on the same network after configuring an external volume integration. External volumes will be automatically created upon discovery and available for attachment to containers and VMs.

• added

  DNS Record Modal

  We've added an improved UI for managing DNS records

• added

  Priority Events Chart

  Surfaces a high-level view of priority events on the environments, clusters, and servers dashboard.

• improvement

  Vultr Bare Metal OOB Support

  Servers deployed on Vultr now automatically use out-of-band (OOB) networks when supported by the underlying bare metal hardware.