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:
âś… Builds your containers using Cloud Build
âś… Manages secure deployments via Cloud Run and managed services
âś… Supports custom domains, advanced networking, GPUs, LLMs, and more
âś… Powers CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions and Pulumi
It also highlights how Defang itself deploys real apps like our Ask Defang chatbot using less than 100 lines of Compose on GCP.
Want to simplify your GCP deployments? Start with Compose, scale with Defang.
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.
Imagine you're building a system. It might use multiple LLM calls. It might do complex, branching logic in its prompts. It might need to store embeddings to retrieve things in the future, either to pull them into a prompt, or to return them outright. It might need to store other records that don't have embeddings. Here's a very lightweight version of a system like that, as a starting point:
Behind the scenes, the workflow is clean and powerful. The browser connects via WebSockets to our app using Django Channels. Heavy work is pushed to a Celery worker. That worker generates an embedding, checks Postgres with pgvector for a match, and either returns the summary or, if there’s no hit, fires up a CrewAI agent to generate one. Every update streams back through Redis and Django Channels so users get progress in real time.
Durable state lives in Postgres and Redis. Model services (LLMs and embeddings) are fully swappable, so you can upgrade to different models in the cloud or localize with the Docker Model Runner without rewriting the full stack.
The Django app is the front door, routing HTTP and WebSocket traffic, serving up the admin, and delivering static content. It’s built on Daphne and Django Channels, with Redis as the channel layer for real-time group events. Django’s admin is your friend here: to start you can check what summaries exist, but if you start building out your own app, it'll make it a breeze to debug and manage your system.
This is where your data lives. Summaries and their 1024-dimension embeddings go here. A simple SQL query checks for close matches by cosine distance, and pgvector’s index keeps search blazing fast. In BYOC (bring-your-own-cloud) mode, flip a single flag and Defang provisions you a production-grade RDS instance.
Redis is doing triple duty: as the message broker and result backend for Celery, and as the channel layer for real-time WebSocket updates. The pub/sub system lets a single worker update all browser tabs listening to the same group. And if you want to scale up, swap a flag and Defang will run managed ElastiCache in production. No code change required.
The Celery worker is where the magic happens. It takes requests off the queue, generates embeddings, checks for similar summaries, and—if necessary—invokes a CrewAI agent to get a new summary. It then persists summaries and pushes progress updates back to the user.
Thanks to Docker Model Runner, the LLM and embedding services run as containerized, OpenAI-compatible HTTP endpoints. Want to switch to a different model? Change a single line in your compose file. Environment variables like LLM_URL and EMBEDDING_MODEL are injected for you—no secret sharing or hard-coding required.
With CrewAI, your agent logic is declarative and pluggable. This sample keeps it simple—a single summarization agent—but you can add classification, tool-calling, or chain-of-thought logic without rewriting your task runner.
In local dev, your compose.local.yaml spins up Gemma and Mixedbread models, running fully locally and with no cloud credentials or API keys required. URLs for service-to-service communication are injected at runtime. When you’re ready to deploy, swap in the main compose.yaml which adds Defang’s x-defang-llm, x-defang-redis, and x-defang-postgres flags. Now, Defang maps your Compose intent to real infrastructure—managed model endpoints, Redis, and Postgres—on cloud providers like AWS or GCP. It handles all networking, secrets, and service discovery for you. There’s no YAML rewriting or “dev vs prod” drift.
You can run everything on your laptop with a single docker compose -f ./compose.local.yaml up command—no cloud dependencies, fast iteration, and no risk of cloud charges. When you’re ready for the next step, use defang compose up to push to the Defang Playground. This free hosted sandbox is perfect for trying Defang, demos, or prototyping. It automatically adds TLS to your endpoints and sleeps after a week. For production, use your own AWS or GCP account. DEFANG_PROVIDER=aws defang compose up maps each service to a managed equivalent (ECS, RDS, ElastiCache, Bedrock models), wires up secrets, networking, etc. Your infra. Your data.
This sample uses vector similarity to try and fetch summaries that are semantically similar to the input. For more robust results, you might want to embed the original input. You can also think about chunking up longer content for finer-grained matches that you can integrate in your CrewAI workflows. Real-time progress via Django Channels beats HTTP polling, especially for LLM tasks that can take a while. The app service is stateless, which means you can scale it horizontally just by adding more containers which is easy to specify in your compose file.
You’re not limited to a single summarization agent. CrewAI makes it trivial to add multi-agent flows (classification, tool use, knowledge retrieval). For big docs, chunk-level embeddings allow granular retrieval. You can wire in tool-calling to connect with external APIs or databases. You can integrate more deeply with Django's ORM and the PGVector tooling that we demo'd in the sample to build more complex agents that actually use RAG.
With this sample, you’ve got an agent-ready, RAG-ready backend that runs anywhere, with no stacks of YAML or vendor lock-in. Fork it, extend it, productionize it: scale up, add more agents, or swap in different models, or more models!
Quickstart:
# Local docker compose -f compose.local.yaml up --build # Playground defang compose up # BYOC # Setup credentials and then swap <provider> with aws or gcp DEFANG_PROVIDER=<provider> defang compose up
Want more? File an issue to request a sample—we'll do everything we can to help you deploy better and faster!
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.
