4 posts tagged with "Debugging"

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!

1. New CLI version 0.6.5: this was a big release with a number of improvements and bug fixes. You can find details in the release notes here, but to highlight a few:

   • defang --provider aws shows improved error message if unauthenticated
   • Added --wait and --wait-timeout flags
   • Improved generate menu: all samples shown (previously these were restricted by language), and we moved the "Generate with AI" option to now be shown in the search filter.

2. AI Debug for BYOC: AI Debug feature is incredibly useful in helping users find and fix issues when something goes wrong. Our initial version only worked on Playground, but now we have extended this to BYOC environments. We hope this makes it even easier for you to deploy your apps to AWS, DigitalOcean, etc.

3. A range of other improvements, including

   • Network aliases support
   • GDPR Delete Me: You can now delete your Defang account from the Defang Portal
   • 30min time-out for the deployments to avoid runaway tasks in your account
   • Allow Postgres major version upgrade, e.g. changing the image frompostgres:14 to postgres:16 in your Compose file (Currently, we only support this in --mode development, we will explore ways to support in other modes in the future.)
   • More feedback logs when containers exit, e.g. failing health-checks
   • Fixes for multiple BYOD domains in a single account

Events and Adoption​

In October, the Defang team was actively involved in a range of exciting events. We participated in MLH Cloud Week, StormHacks, and hosted a DevTools Vancouver meetup, bringing together local DevTool founders, engineers, and enthusiasts. It was inspiring to see Defang in action, helping these hackers build their amazing projects.

When we shipped our Public Beta earlier in 2024, we had a goal to reach 1000 users by end of year. We are pleased to announce that we have already reached this milestone a couple of months in advance! We are excited to see the momentum behind the product and how our users are using Defang for developing and deploying a variety of different applications. Thank you for your support!

The Road Ahead​

The team is now heads-down dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s so we can release Defang V1 before end of year. This will enable customers to use Defang for production workloads. We look forward to sharing more in our next monthly update.

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Defang Coffee Chat ☕​

If you're excited about what's coming next and want to hear more about our vision for the future, join us for our Coffee Chat on November 27th. We'll be sharing more about our roadmap and what we're working on next.

Register here!

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As always, we appreciate your feedback and are committed to making Defang the easiest way to develop, deploy, and debug your cloud applications. Go build something awesome! 🚀

Hi everyone - you can feel the weather getting cooler, but things are heating up at Defang! Sep was another amazing month, with new features, new users, and new partners. Here is a quick summary:

1. Bring-Your-Own-Cloud (BYOC) DigitalOcean in Preview! From the very beginning, it has been part of Defang’s vision to not only provide a simpler way to develop, deploy, and debug your cloud applications, but to be able to do so in a portable way. As developers, we all value the flexibility of knowing our application can be deployed to our chosen cloud, even if that choice changes over time. Today, we take a big step in providing that choice with the Preview of BYOC with DigitalOcean! This literally means the same application can be deployed to the Defang Playground, AWS, or DigitalOcean with no changes! Take a look at the docs, give it a try and share your feedback on our Discord.
2. Managed Postgres: Postgres is one of the fundamental building blocks of many applications, and users wanted us to provide a way to add that to their application in a declarative way. So that’s exactly what we have done. You can now specify the Postgres image in your compose.yaml file and indicate that you want it managed by your cloud provider using x-defang-postgres: true in your service definition. Defang will automatically provision the appropriate managed Postgres in the target cloud (e.g. RDS on AWS) and do all the heavy lifting to configure and hook things up correctly. Check out the docs here, give it a try and let us know what you think.
3. We continue to improve the quality and performance of existing features:
   1. We’ve made several improvements to our AI-assistant to increase the robustness of our Develop and Debug modules. For example, we updated generation to comply with latest Compose spec. We also addressed the top issues we saw people facing when deploying, such as out-of-memory errors when building containers.
   2. To cope with our growing user-base, we have made several scaling improvements to our Playground and Portal environments.
   3. We also made several updates to our documentation and samples to keep up with the changes and enhancements in the Defang product.

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September Events​

In Sep, the Defang team participated in a number of events including HacktheNorth, LangaraHacks, MLH Global Hack Week and other MLH hackathons. It’s great to see Defang being put to use by these hackers to build their amazing projects. And we get useful insights from these events that help us improve the product. We will continue to do more of these events in the future - watch our LinkedIn page for announcements.

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Google for Startups Accelerator Canada​

Also in Sep, Defang was included in the Google for Startups Accelerator Canada. This is a great recognition of the value Defang is providing to cloud developers. Through our collaboration with Google, we hope to add GCP as another target cloud for Defang in the coming months - stay tuned!

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Defang Coffee Chat​

Mark your calendars! If you’re eager to learn more about what’s coming next, join us for our Defang Coffee Chat on Oct 23rd. We’ll be sharing our future roadmap, answering your questions, and gathering your feedback.

Register here!

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As always, we appreciate your feedback and are committed to making Defang the easiest way to develop, deploy, and debug your cloud applications. Go build something awesome! 🚀

Wow - what a month of August it has been! We made some big strides of progress on our vision of providing a radically simpler way to Develop, Deploy, and Debug portable cloud applications.

Ask Defang​

We've just rolled out an initial version of Ask Defang, our AI-driven documentation assistant that can help you navigate the Defang docs and get deploying faster. It's deployed with Defang and using a combination of embeddings run on a GPU-powered service, Defang managed Redis, and OpenAI APIs.

Check it out here or head to ask.defang.io to get started!

Enhanced Platform Symmetry​

We've been hard at work improving the symmetry between our Playground and BYOC environments as well as docker compose up vs defang compose up to provide a more seamless experience. You can now use multiple compose files and in BYOC the CLI will subscribe to events to monitor service health during deployments.

AI Features and Debugging Improvements​

We've been working on several AI-driven enhancements to make your development process even more efficient. We've addressed key issues, such as file generation failures due to parsing errors and invalid compose files. Also, our Debug Assistant is now more robust, handling context size limits better than before.

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August Events​

This month, we hosted an in-person workshop to get more developers acquainted with Defang and simplify their cloud app journey. You can view the presentation here. We also held the first-ever DevTools Vancouver meetup, bringing together local DevTool founders, engineers, and enthusiasts.

Looking ahead, we’re excited to collaborate with MLH, Hack the North, LangaraHacks, and more in September. If you'd like to attend any of these events, be sure to sign up!

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Townhall​

Mark your calendars! If you’re eager to learn more about what’s coming next, join us for our Townhall on September 25th. We’ll be sharing our future roadmap, answering your questions, and gathering your feedback.

Register here!

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Roadmap​

We're working on a number of new features to make Defang even better. Here are some of the most exciting ones:

• Managed Postgres: We're working on getting Defang to provision managed Postgres services for you, so you can easily store and query data in your applications.
• Digital Ocean BYOC: We're working on adding Digital Ocean BYOC to give you even more choice over where you deploy your applications.

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We’re excited to keep enhancing Defang to make it the easiest way for you to Develop, Deploy, and Debug cloud applications. Stay tuned for more updates next month! 🚀

Hey folks! We can’t believe a month has gone by already, time flies when you’re having fun! We continued to make progress on our vision of providing a radically simpler way to Develop, Deploy, and Debug cloud applications. In July, we spent time on a couple of key areas:

1. As our user-base grows, we wanted to make sure we’re able to scale our Playground environment to be able to handle the load. This involved being able to shard the workload across multiple ALBs and being able to dynamically move some workloads across shards where possible. With these changes, we are now able handle a large number of concurrent users comfortably. The only noticeable change in behavior you would see is that Defang will now ask you to “compose down” your previous project before you are able to deploy a new project on Playground.

2. The major news this month was the introduction of our “debug” functionality. The motivation for this feature was that while the Defang experience is amazing when everything goes smoothly, we saw users (including our own interns who are helping write all those samples) struggle when they hit an error. The underlying reason for the error could come from a variety of sources: an error in the developer’s application (including in their Dockerfile or Compose file), an issue in the way Defang is processing the application, or an issue in the underlying cloud platform (currently, AWS). To the developer, it is often not obvious what the issue is or how to fix it. That got us thinking how we could make this debugging experience “radically simpler” and thus the idea for defang debug was born.

   Now (with CLI v0.5.37 if your application encounters an error that leads to a failed deployment, a failed health-check, or a run-time error, Defang will automatically detect the issue. It will then offer to help you debug it by running the defang debug command. If you choose to proceed, Defang will apply an LLM model to try to determine the precise cause of the error, with the context of your application source, logs, error code etc. And it will try to come up with one or more actionable insights on how to fix the error. For an example, see the case below:

   Behind the scenes, Defang is having a conversation on your behalf with the LLM to narrow down to the cause of the error. We would love for you to try the debug feature and give us your feedback so we can improve it further. One future improvement already on our list is the ability to, with user consent, automatically apply a chosen fix and re-try. We are also looking for way to improve the range of failures we are able to diagnose successfully.

Townhall​

If you're excited about what's coming next and want to hear more about our vision for the future, join us for our Townhall on August 21st. We'll be sharing more about our roadmap and what we're working on next. We'll also be making sure to take time to answer any questions you have, hear your feedback, and learn more about what you want from Defang!

Register here

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We’re excited to keep improving Defang to make it the easiest way for you to Develop, Deploy, and Debug cloud application. Stay tuned for more updates next month.