13 posts tagged with "AI"

If you want people to adopt your AI product, the deployment story has to be as strong as the features.

Over the past few decades, the software industry has gone through multiple major transitions. Each one reshaped not only how products are delivered, but also how they are trusted.

• In the Client-Server Era (circa 2000), apps like SAP and PeopleSoft were purchased and deployed by the customer in their own "on-prem" environment. The customer was in control, but also took on the operational complexity of everything from procuring and deploying hardware to the system software and the apps themselves.
• In the SaaS Era (circa 2010s), apps such as Salesforce and Workday ran in the provider's cloud and were delivered through the browser. While this simplified operations for the customer, it also meant that the customer data was trapped in these applications, with sometimes ambiguous data ownership and usage rules.
• Today, we are entering the Agentic Era. Agentic apps promise to deliver an unprecedented productivity boost, but to do so, they need access to the most sensitive business data: conversations, documents, decisions. Customers do not want to transfer such data to an unknown and untrusted external provider's environment. Instead, they expect these products to run inside their cloud accounts (whether it be AWS, GCP, or any other), with their compliance, and under their security controls.

This is not a small adjustment. It is the foundation of how the next generation of software will be trusted and adopted.

August was about making migrations smoother and showing how you can already use Defang to deploy agentic apps at scale. We expanded our sample projects for popular multi-agent frameworks like CrewAI, LangGraph, Autogen, and Strands, validating them on Playground, AWS, and GCP so you can run multi-agent workloads in production without extra DevOps. Our new Heroku migration flow inspects dynos and add-ons, generates a clean Compose file, provisions managed equivalents like Postgres and Redis, and ships to your own cloud in one command. This cuts costs and removes lock-in. We also introduced MCP BYOC prompts so you can deploy to AWS and GCP straight from your IDE. Railpack on GCP now delivers faster, more reliable no-Dockerfile builds with clearer logs and closer parity with AWS.

Deploying Agentic Apps to the Cloud Shouldn’t Be This Hard…​

Agentic apps are redefining how software is built: multi-agent workflows, persistent memory, tool-using LLMs, and orchestrated autonomy. But deploying them to the cloud is still painful - for example, your agentic app typically needs to provision:

• Managed databases like Postgres or MongoDB
• Fast, scalable caching (hello Redis)
• Containerized compute that scales
• Secure networking and service discovery
• Managed LLMs like AWS Bedrock or GCP Vertex AI

And for many teams, these apps must run inside the customer’s cloud, where sensitive data lives and compliance rules apply. That means you cannot just spin up your own environment and call it a day. Instead, you are deploying across AWS, GCP, DigitalOcean, or whichever stack your customers demand, each with its own APIs, quirks, and limitations.

Now you are not just building agents; you are picking the right infrastructure, rewriting IaC templates for every provider, and untangling the edge cases of each cloud.

The result: weeks of DevOps headaches, lost momentum, and engineers stuck wiring infrastructure instead of shipping agents.

July was all about making cloud deployments even smoother and smarter. We focused on removing friction from deployments and giving you better visibility into costs. Railpack now builds production-ready images automatically when no Dockerfile is present, and our real-time cost estimation feature now supports Google Cloud alongside AWS. We also added managed MongoDB on GCP, introduced an Agentic LangGraph sample, and connected with builders at Bière & Code & Beer MTL. Here’s what’s new.

"I'm building a project, but it's not really coding. I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff. And it mostly works."

– Andrej Karpathy

Welcome to the world of vibe coding, an AI-assisted, intuition-driven way of building software. You do not spend hours reading diffs, organizing files, or hunting through documentation. You describe what you want, let the AI take a pass, and keep iterating until it works.

Wow - another month has gone by, time flies when you're having fun!

Let us share some important updates regarding what we achieved at Defang in March:

Anthropic recently unveiled the Model Context Protocol (MCP), “a new standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data lives”. However, as Docker pointed out, “packaging and distributing MCP Servers is very challenging due to complex environment setups across multiple architectures and operating systems”. Docker helps to solve this problem by enabling developers to “encapsulate their development environment into containers, ensuring consistency across all team members’ machines and deployments.” The Docker work includes a list of reference MCP Servers packaged up as containers, which you can deploy locally and test your AI application.

However, to put such containerized AI applications into production, you need to be able to not only test locally, but also easily deploy the application to the cloud. This is what Defang enables. In this blog and the accompanying sample, we show how to build a sample AI application using one of the reference MCP Servers, run and test it locally using Docker, and when ready, to easily deploy it to the cloud of your choice (AWS, GCP, or DigitalOcean) using Defang.

Welcome to 2025! As we had shared in our early Dec update, we reached our V1 milestone with support for GCP and DigitalOcean in Preview and production support for AWS. We were very gratified to see the excitement around our launch, with Defang ending 2024 with twice the number of users as our original goal!

We are excited to build on that momentum going into 2025. And we are off to a great start in Jan, with some key advancements:

At Defang, we’re enabling developers go from idea to code to deployment 10x faster. We’re thrilled to announce that Defang V1 is officially launching during our action-packed Launch Week, running from December 4–10, 2024! This marks a major milestone as we officially release the tools and features developers have been waiting for.

Hi everyone,

We are a little late getting our monthly update out this time, but we did ship a number of important updates in October that we would like to inform you about. And more is coming… stay tuned for that!