4 posts tagged with "Docker Compose"

When you launch a new app, convenience rules. Platforms like Heroku offer a beautifully simple way to push code and see it live in minutes. You don’t need to think about servers, networks or databases. You just deploy. That’s why so many of us start there.

But convenience has a cost. As your product grows, you want more control over performance and security. You want to integrate your own services, tune the infrastructure and optimize your spend. Heroku’s dyno‑based pricing, which starts around $25/month for a modest dyno and climbs to hundreds of dollars for high‑performance dynos, can become prohibitive for serious production workloads. And while Heroku abstracts away the underlying cloud, that abstraction also means you can’t fine‑tune the way your application runs.

This trade‑off eventually becomes untenable. Teams need the simplicity of a platform like Heroku and the power and trust of running inside their own AWS account. This post unpacks why migrating off Heroku matters, highlights the friction points when you try to move to AWS yourself, and shows how the Defang CLI bridges the gap.

Introducing Our New Whitepaper: Simple, Secure, and Scalable GCP Deployments from Docker Compose

We’re excited to share our latest whitepaper, Defang + GCP: Simple, Secure, and Scalable Deployments from Docker Compose.

Deploying to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) doesn’t have to be complicated. Docker Compose made defining local apps simple, and Defang makes cloud deployments just as easy.

With Defang, you can:

• Deploy to GCP with a single command. Go from Compose to Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, and more with just defang compose up --provider=gcp.
• Skip the DevOps overhead. No need for Terraform, Pulumi, or custom scripts. Defang maps your Compose services to the right GCP resources — compute, storage, networking, and even managed LLMs.
• Enjoy built-in security and scalability. Defang automates GCP best practices, handling service accounts, secret management, HTTPS, auto-scaling, and more.
• Integrate with your workflow. Deploy from your terminal, GitHub Actions, or even natural language prompts in VS Code, Cursor, or Windsurf.
• Save costs and avoid surprises. Choose from affordable, balanced, or high-availability modes with built-in cost estimation coming soon.

Our whitepaper walks through how Defang integrates with GCP, including how it:

Why Build a Starter Kit for RAG + Agents?​

Let’s be honest: every developer who’s played with LLMs gets that rush of “wow” from the first working demo. But the real headaches show up when you need to stitch LLMs into something production-grade: an app that can pull in real data, coordinate multi-step logic, and more. Suddenly, you’re not just writing single prompts. You’re coordinating between multiple prompts, managing queues, adding vector databases, orchestrating workers, and trying to get things back to the user in real-time. We've found that CrewAI (coordinating prompts, agents, tools) + Django (building an api, managing data), with a bit of Celery (orchestrating workers/async tasks), is a really nice set of tools for this. We're also going to use Django Channels (real-time updates) to push updates back to the user. And of course, we'll use Defang to deploy all that to the cloud.

If this sounds familiar (or if you're dreading the prospect of dealing with it), you’re the target audience for this sample. Instead of slogging through weeks of configuration and permissions hell, you get a ready-made template that runs on your laptop, then scales—unchanged—to Defang’s Playground, and finally to your own AWS or GCP account. All the gnarly infra is abstracted, so you can focus on getting as much value as possible out of that magical combo of CrewAI and Django.

Introducing Our New Whitepaper: Bridging Local Development and Cloud Deployment with Docker Compose and Defang

We’re excited to announce the release of our new whitepaper, "Bridging Local Development and Cloud Deployment with Docker Compose and Defang."

Modern software development moves fast, but deploying to the cloud often remains a complex hurdle. Docker Compose revolutionized local development by providing a simple way to define multi-service apps, but translating that simplicity into cloud deployment has remained challenging—until now.

Defang bridges this gap by extending Docker Compose into native cloud deployments across AWS, GCP, DigitalOcean, and more, all with a single command: defang compose up. This integration empowers developers to:

• Use familiar Docker Compose definitions for cloud deployment.
• Enjoy seamless transitions from local to multi-cloud environments.
• Automate complex infrastructure setups including DNS, networking, autoscaling, managed storage, and even managed LLMs.
• Estimate cloud costs and choose optimal deployment strategies (affordable, balanced, or high availability).

Our whitepaper dives deep into how Docker Compose paired with Defang significantly reduces complexity, streamlines workflows, and accelerates development and deployment.

Discover how Docker + Defang can simplify your journey from local development to production-ready deployments across your preferred cloud providers.