Ship It Conversations: Jake Warner on Cycle.io, Bare Metal’s Comeback, and Why Private Cloud Is Getting Interesting Again

This is a guest conversation episode of Ship It Weekly, separate from the weekly news recaps.

In this Ship It: Conversations episode, I talk with Jake Warner, founder and CEO of Cycle.io, about private cloud, bare metal, Kubernetes fatigue, and why some teams are rethinking how much infrastructure complexity they actually want to carry.

We talk about why bare metal and private cloud are getting interesting again, especially around cost, performance, data sovereignty, compliance, and platform ownership. Jake explains how Cycle approaches infrastructure as a pool of resources, why he thinks in terms of “environments as code” instead of traditional infrastructure as code, and how teams can run containers and VMs together across bare metal, cloud, and hybrid environments.

The bigger theme here is that this is not really a “cloud versus bare metal” conversation. It is about choosing the right level of abstraction. Sometimes Kubernetes is the right answer. Sometimes managed cloud services make sense. And sometimes teams just need a more opinionated platform that lets developers ship without requiring a large DevOps army to keep everything running.

Highlights

• Why some teams are moving back toward private cloud and bare metal

• The role of cost, data sovereignty, compliance, and performance in infrastructure decisions

• Why bare metal does not have to mean going back to old-school racking and stacking pain

• How Cycle turns raw compute into a private cloud-style resource pool

• Why Jake thinks about “environments as code” instead of only infrastructure as code

• What “no DevOps army required” means in practice for engineering-heavy teams

• Why some companies need VMs and containers running together on the same platform

• Where Kubernetes still makes sense, especially for highly customized infrastructure needs

• Why opinionated platforms can be valuable when teams want fewer knobs and better defaults

• Active-active thinking, failover risk, and why application-level replication often matters more than platform-level storage magic

• Why bandwidth, performance density, and predictable pricing can make bare metal attractive again

• The weird continued gravity of AWS us-east-1, even for teams trying to move workloads elsewhere

• How AI workloads, GPUs, and hype cycles fit into the private cloud and platform conversation

• Jake’s advice for modernizing hybrid or on-prem infrastructure: containerize first, then look hard at your dependencies

Jake’s links

• Cycle.io: https://cycle.io/

• Cycle Slack community: https://slack.cycle.io/

• Jake Warner on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakewarner/

Our links

More episodes + show notes + links: https://shipitweekly.fm

On Call Brief: https://oncallbrief.com