Hey folks! There is a lot going on at Defang and we're excited to share our latest product updates with you. Over the last month, we've been working hard to improve the Defang system and make it even easier for you to deploy your applications. Here's a quick overview of what we've been up to:

Hey folks! Today, I'm going to share one of our code samples that will show you how to deploy a simple Slack bot. If you're looking to connect a cloud service to Slack to publish status updates, or something else like that, this should help you get started. We'll walk through a step-by-step process of writing a Go program using the github.com/slack-go/slack library to interact with the Slack API and easily deploy it using Defang.

Defang is aiming to reduce the barriers to entry to cloud application development. With our tooling, we make it really easy to deploy multi-service containerized applications to your own cloud with a single command.

We want it to be easy for you to try Defang with as little friction as possible, though, so we have done the work so you can easily get started in a GitHub Codespaces environment, a GitPod Workspace, or even a local Dev Container.

As a student at University of British Columbia, new to the area of web development, I needed to develop and deploy a web application as a course project. It was already a huge challenge to complete the coding part. I could not believe that an even bigger challenge awaited. Picking the right platform and services is tough to start with. Do you know that AWS offers 200 different services? Lucky for me my professors’ instructed us to use ECS. Otherwise, I would have been totally lost.

Starting my project, honestly, it felt like I was hitting a brick wall. Diving into AWS with little to no clue was tough. Terms like "ECS clusters," "task definitions," and "IAM roles" were flying over my head. I was scared of messing something up, especially when it came to setting up things like ECR and load balancers.

It was overwhelming when all these unfamiliar concepts came at me at once. I searched them up on the internet and went straight to a top-rated YouTube tutorial. I spent an hour and a half going through the whole video series. Those tutorials, as helpful as they were, couldn't fully prepare me for the hands-on challenges of real-life implementation. It's one thing to follow along with a guide when everything goes right; it's another to adapt when things don't quite match up to the tutorial’s scenarios.

I ran into so many problems with configuring services. Sometimes it is caused by carelessly selecting the wrong options; sometimes it is due to the fact that I have no idea what the buttons mean; sometimes it is just a bug with my code. Those errors triple the time it took to deploy my project. It was indeed extremely frustrating.

Announcing the Defang Public Beta

A radically simpler way for developers to create, deploy, and manage cloud applications.

Ever since we shipped our Private Beta in the summer of 2023, we have been working with early adopters and listening to their feedback. While these early customers loved the ease with which they could create, deploy, and manage a cloud application, they had one big request - to deploy their applications to their own cloud (e.g. AWS) account. This was important to them for a number of reasons - to leverage their cloud credits, to enforce their IAM roles and security settings, to integrate new application components with their existing deployments, and more.

And so, today with our Public Beta, we are addressing this request. With today’s release of Defang BYOC (Bring-your-own-Cloud), you can now enjoy all the benefits of Defang and deploy applications to your own AWS account! Our Private Beta experience is still available as Defang Playground for you to quickly and easily prototype applications and deploy them to our hosted environment.

You can learn more about Defang here. Also check out our tutorials, samples, and FAQ to know more.

Announcing the Private Beta for the Defang Opinionated Platform: Radically Simplifying and Cloud Application Development, Deployment, and Optimization

We're thrilled to announce the release of our Private Beta for the Defang Opinionated Platform (DOP). We started Defang because, as practitioners with experience in both building cloud apps and building cloud platforms, we were unhappy with the state of the art. It was, and remains, too difficult to develop, deploy, and optimize cloud applications. In architecting and building a cloud app, developers need to consider a variety of factors such as performance, scalability, cost, security, flexibility, simplicity, etc. At the same time, they face a bewildering array of choices - from app architecture to choice of cloud platforms and services, to configuration and deployment, CI-CD, security setting, etc. - in topics that they are not experts in. Clearly, we need a better way.

We realize that improving on this state of affairs is a long journey. Today, we are taking an initial step with the release of the Private Beta of the DOP. The DOP enables AI-assisted development, with the ability to specify a high-level prompt and get back an initial version of your cloud service code, which can then be refined further. The DOP simplifies CI-CD by automatically building and deploying new artifacts to your target environments when you push new code to your source repository, taking care of all dependency management and build tasks. And the DOP pre-provisions properly secured and configured staging and production environments for your application, optimized for security, scaling, and cost.