Defang V3

I remember meeting Lionello Lunesu in March 2022. Our mutual friend Bjorn had put us in touch, saying that we were both working on a similar problem:

It's too damn hard to deploy to the cloud.

I was approaching it from a very high level: a framework that provided high level primitives that could address many use cases, and some underlying infra provisioning code to make sure those high level primitives played nice in cloud providers.

Lio was working from the other direction: I remember him talking about how to manage pretty low-level DNS stuff and making sure it was easy to deploy and extremely resilient.

We started grabbing coffees more frequently, talking about Kubernetes, AWS, and all kinds of other stuff we were both dealing with as we worked on these problems separately.

Man, did we have some wacky conversations about managing k8s, how to map out a local development story with a cloud deployment story, exploring stuff like making queues and serverless work nicely in a local and cloud environment, across use cases.

He was building what became Defang.

Eventually I met the rest of the team as they settled on Docker's "Compose" file as a standard to define an app that would work locally and in the cloud.

To me that sounded like magic: I started using Docker Compose back in 2016 and had probably searched for "scalable Docker Compose to Cloud" a few times per year, but to no avail (Swarm was always clunky and the CF templates always crashed on me).

Defang's approach was different, too: the idea wasn't to shove everything into an expensive Kubernetes cluster, but to use the cloud provider's native container runtimes, like AWS ECS or GCP Cloud Run to the extent possible, which has all kinds of benefits.

Eventually I helped build the first version of the Defang Portal and later on joined the team.

The "compose to cloud" flow has been working for a while, but it worked best locally, or if you were already familiar with your cloud provider's tooling.

This release changes that.

I've been testing our flows and I love this: you can log into Defang, AWS, and GitHub and use Defang to connect them all in the browser to launch an app that uses queues, databases, LLMs and more without ever leaving your browser.

And it's all running in your own AWS account.

You can also use our MCP server or our CLI agent to help you deploy your app from your machine to the cloud: you don't need to be an infra expert to deploy something pretty complex.

I'm really excited about this release. This is the product I've been looking for for almost 10 years, and I think a lot of you would actually love it.