12 posts tagged with "Defang Compose Update"

May was a big month at Defang. We shipped support for managed LLMs in Playground, added MongoDB support on AWS, improved the Defang MCP Server, and dropped new AI samples to make deploying faster than ever.

🚀 Managed LLMs in Playground​

You can now try managed LLMs directly in the Defang Playground. Defang makes it easy to use cloud-native language models across providers — and now you can test them instantly in the Playground.

• Managed LLM support
• Playground-ready
• Available in CLI v1.1.22 or higher

To use managed language models in your own Defang services, just add x-defang-llm: true — Defang will configure the appropriate roles and permissions for you.

Already built on the OpenAI API? No need to rewrite anything.

With Defang's OpenAI Access Gateway, you can run your existing apps on Claude, DeepSeek, Mistral, and more — using the same OpenAI format.

Learn more here.

Try it out here.

📦 MongoDB Preview on AWS​

Last month, we added support for MongoDB-compatible workloads on AWS via Amazon DocumentDB.

Just add this to your compose.yaml:

services:
  db:
    x-defang-mongodb: true

Once you add x-defang-mongodb: true, Defang will auto-spin a DocumentDB cluster in your AWS — no setup needed.

🛠 MCP Server Improvements​

We've made the MCP Server and CLI easier to use and deploy:

• Users are now prompted to agree to Terms of Service via the portal login
• MCP Server and CLI are now containerized, enabling faster setup, smoother deployments, and better portability across environments

🌎 Events and Community​

We kicked off the month by sponsoring Vancouver's first Vibe Coding IRL Sprint. Jordan Stephens from Defang ran a hands-on workshop on "Ship AI Faster with Vertex AI" with GDG Vancouver (GDG Vancouver). Around the same time, our CTO and Co-founder Lio joined the GenAI Founders Fireside panel hosted by AInBC and AWS.

Big moment for the team — we won the Best Canadian Cloud Award at the Vancouver Cloud Summit. Right after, we hit the expo floor at Web Summit Vancouver as part of the BETA startup program and got featured by FoundersBeta as one of the Top 16 Startups to Watch.

Our Campus Advocates also kept the momentum going, hosting Defang events around the world with live demos and workshops.

Last month's Defang Coffee Chat brought together the community for product updates, live demos, and a great convo on vibe deploying.

We're back again on June 25 at 10 AM PST. Save your spot here.

We can't wait to see what you deploy with Defang. Join our Discord to ask questions, get support, and share your builds.

More coming in June.

April flew by with big momentum at Defang. From deeper investments in the Model Context Protocol (MCP), to deploying LLM-based inferencing apps, to live demos of Vibe Deploying, we're making it easier than ever to go from idea to cloud.

MCP + Vibe Deploying​

This month we focused on making cloud deployments as easy as writing a prompt. Our latest Vibe Deploying blog shows how you can launch full-stack apps right from your IDE just by chatting.

Whether you're working in Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code, or Claude, Defang's MCP integration lets you deploy to the cloud just as easily as conversing with the AI to generate your app. For more details, check out the docs for the Defang Model Context Protocol Server – it explains how it works, how to use it, and why it's a game changer for deploying to the cloud. You can also watch our tutorials for Cursor, Windsurf, and VS Code.

Managed LLMs​

Last month we shipped the x-defang-llm compose service extension to easily deploy inferencing apps that use managed LLM services such as AWS Bedrock. This month, we're excited to announce the same support for GCP Vertex AI – give it a try and let us know your feedback!

Events and Programs​

On April 28, we kicked things off with an epic night of demos, dev energy, and cloud magic at RAG & AI in Action. Our own Kevin Vo showed how fast and easy it is to deploy AI apps from Windsurf to the cloud using just the Defang MCP. The crowd got a front-row look at how Vibe Deploying turns cloud infra into a background detail.

We finished the month with our signature Defang Coffee Chat, a casual hangout with product updates, live Q&A, and great conversations with our community. Our Campus Advocates also hosted workshops around the world, bringing Defang to new students and builders.

We wrapped up the month with our latest Defang Coffee Chat, featuring live demos, product updates, and a solid conversation around vibe deploying. Thanks to everyone who joined.

The next one is on May 21 at 10 AM PST. Save your spot here.

Looking Ahead​

Here's what's coming in May:

• Web Summit Vancouver – Defang will be a startup sponsor, please come see us on the expo floor.
• More MCP tutorials and dev tools.

Let's keep building. 🚀

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:

1. GCP parity with AWS: We are really excited to announce that our GCP provider is now feature-complete, with support for key features such as Managed Postgres, Managed Redis, BYOD (Bring-Your-Own-Domain), GPUs, AI-assisted Debugging, and more. Install the latest version of our CLI and give it a try! Please let us know your feedback.
2. Defang Deployed with Defang: In 2025, we are doubling our focus on production use-cases where developers are using Defang every day to deploy their production apps. And where better to start than with Defang itself? We had already been using Defang to deploy portions of our infrastructure (such as our web site), but we are super happy to report that now we are using Defang to deploy all our services - including our Portal, Playground, the Defang back-end (aka Fabric) and more. We’ll be sharing more about how we did this, and publishing some of the related artifacts, in a blog post soon - stay tuned.
3. Campus Advocate Program: One of our key goals for 2025 is to bring Defang to more students and hobbyists. To do this, we are very excited to launch our Campus Advocate Program, a community of student leaders passionate about cloud technology. Our advocates will build communities, host events, and help peers adopt cloud development with Defang. If you’re a student eager to drive cloud innovation on your campus, we’d love to hear from you - you can apply here.
4. 1-click Deploy instructions: One of our most popular features is the ability to deploy any of our 50+ samples with a single click. We have now published instructions showing how you can provide a similar experience for your project or sample. We are curious to see what you deploy with this!
5. Model Context Protocol sample: AI agents are of course the rage nowadays. Recently, Docker published a blog showing how you can use Docker to containerize “servers” following Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol. We have now published a sample that shows you how to easily deploy such containerized servers to the cloud using Defang - check it out here.

So, you can see we have been busy! But that is not all - we have a lot more in the pipeline in the coming months. Stay tuned - it’s going to be an exciting 2025!

P.S.: Defang is now on Bluesky! Follow us to stay connected, get the latest updates, and join the conversation. See you there!

The moment is finally here – Defang V1 is officially LIVE on Product Hunt! 🎉

Over the past few months, our team has been working tirelessly to create a tool that transforms how developers develop, deploy, and debug cloud apps. With Defang, you can go from idea to your favorite cloud in minutes. 🚀

Today, we have the opportunity to showcase Defang to a global audience, and your support could make all the difference!

If you already have a Product Hunt account, it's super easy.

• ✅ You can support our product if you like what we have built so far
• ✅ You can leave a comment and any feedback you may have (comments are great!)
• ✅ You can leave a review

Product Hunt launches are time sensitive as they last 24 hours, so if you have 30 seconds available right now, it would really mean a lot.

If you don't already have a Product Hunt account, please don't create one now to upvote (we may get penalized for that).

Instead, you can like and share our (e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or Facebook) posts . Thank you in advance. Your support means the world.

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.

What’s New in Defang CLI V1?​

Defang is a powerful tool that lets you easily develop, deploy, and debug production-ready cloud applications. With Defang V1, we continue to deliver on our vision to make cloud development effortlessly simple and portable, with the ability to develop once and deploy anywhere. Here’s what’s included in this milestone release:

• Production-Ready Support for AWS

Seamlessly deploy and scale with confidence on AWS. Defang is now WAFR-compliant, assuring that your deployments conform to all the best-practices for AWS deployments. Defang is now officially part of the AWS Partner Network.

• New - Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in Preview

This week, we are excited to unveil support for deployments to GCP, in Preview. Start building and exploring and give us feedback as we work to enhance the experience further and move towards production support. Defang is also now officially part of the Google Cloud Partner Advantage program.

• Support for DigitalOcean in Preview

Developers using DigitalOcean can explore our Preview features, with further enhancements and production support coming soon.

Defang Product Tiers and Introductory Pricing 🛠️

As we move into V1, we are also rolling out our differentiated product tiers, along with our special introductory pricing. Fear not, we will always have a free tier for hobbyists - conveniently called the Hobby tier. We now also provide Personal, Pro, and Enterprise tiers for customers with more advanced requirements. Check out what is included in each here. And as always, the Defang CLI is and remains open-source.

Launch Week Activities​

We’ve lined up an exciting week of activities to showcase the power of Defang and bring together our growing community:

• December 4: Vancouver CDW x AWS re:Invent Watch Party

Join us at the Vancouver CDW x AWS re:Invent Watch Party, where we will have a booth showcasing Defang’s capabilities and AWS integration. Stop by to learn more about Defang and see a live demo from the Defang dev team.

• December 5–6: GFSA DemoDay and Git Push to 2025: Devs Social Party

Hear directly from Defang’s co-founder and CTO, Lio Lunesu, as we unveil Defang’s support for GCP at the Google for Startups Accelerator (GFSA) DemoDay event in Toronto. This event will also be live-streamed here.

Additionally, join us on December 5th for the final meetup of the year for Vancouver’s developer groups, hosted by VanJS in collaboration with other local dev communities.

• December 6 & 7: MLH Global Hack Week (GHW)

Join us during MLH Global Hack Week for hands-on workshops and learn how to build production-ready cloud applications in minutes with Defang.

• December 7: Cloud Chat

An IRL event with our team to explore V1 features in depth, answer your questions, and share insights from our journey.

• December 10: Product Hunt Launch

Be part of our Product Hunt debut and show your support as we reach the broader tech community.

Join the Celebration 🎉​

This launch week is not just about us. It is about you, our community. Here is how you can get involved:

1. Explore the Platform: Sign up at Defang.io and dive into V1.

2. Attend Events: Mark your calendar for our scheduled activities.

3. Spread the Word: Follow us on LinkedIn and X, share your experiences, and let others know why you love Defang.

We’re excited to celebrate this milestone with all of you. Stay tuned for more updates, and let’s make Launch Week unforgettable!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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.
• DigitalOcean BYOC: We're working on adding DigitalOcean BYOC to give you even more choice over where you deploy your applications.

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

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.

Hey folks! We've got another batch of updates to share with you about what the Defang team has been working on over the past month. We're committed to improving your deployment experience, so let's take a look at what's new.

Windows Experience Improvements​

For our Windows users out there, we've made some changes to make your Defang experience even smoother:

• You can now install Defang using winget, the Windows Package Manager, for a streamlined setup
• We've introduced a signed binary for added security and peace of mind

Deploying your apps from Windows just got a little bit nicer.

One-click Deploy​

We've added a new feature that will make it even easier to get started with Defang. We've created a flow where each sample provides a button that allows you to immediately deploy a template with a GitHub action which will automatically deploy the sample to the Defang Playground. That means you can easily make changes by committing them to your brand new repo, and everything automatically updates in the Playground. It's a great way to get started with Defang and start experimenting with your own projects.

Try it now from our portal!

Managed Redis Updates​

We first introduced this last month, but we've since rolled it out to everyone. We also added a sample that showcases the power of managed Redis: BullMQ with Redis. It demonstrates how you can use BullMQ and BullBoard with a managed Redis instance to create a powerful job queue system so you can easily build robust, scalable applications in AWS with Defang.

Updated Samples​

We've updated our sample projects to showcase how to use them with Defang, including:

• ASP.NET Core
• Feathers.js
• Flask & LangChain
• BullMQ with Redis

Check them out if you're looking for some inspiration or a starting point for your own projects.

CLI Updates​

We're always looking for ways to enhance the CLI experience. Here's what's new:

• npx defang automatically checks to always have the latest version of the CLI
• The output during defang compose up has been streamlined to focus on the most important information
• defang tail now supports listening to specific services, making it easier to troubleshoot issues
• We've improved hints and error messages to better guide you when something goes wrong
• The CLI now has improved color support for light theme terminals, making it easier on the eyes

It's the small refinements that can make a big difference in your workflow.

Other Updates​

Here are a few more things that didn't quite fit with the rest:

• Visibility into ECS deployment events in BYOC tail logs
• Improvements to ACME certificate generation

Keep an eye out for these updates in the near future.

As always, we'd love your help shaping the future of Defang, so let us know what you'd like to see next. Happy deploying! 🚀