3 posts tagged with "Events"

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. 🚀

Well, that went by quick! Seems like it was just a couple of weeks ago that we published the Jan update, and it’s already time for the next one. Still, we do have some exciting progress to report in this short month!

1. Pulumi Provider: We are excited to announce a Preview of the Defang Pulumi Provider. With the Defang Pulumi Provider, you can leverage all the power of Defang with all of the extensibility of Pulumi. Defang will provision infrastructure to deploy your application straight from your Compose file, while allowing you to connect that deployment with other resources you deploy to your cloud account. The new provider makes it easy to leverage Defang if you’re already using Pulumi, and it also provides an upgrade-path for users who need more configurability than the Compose specification can provide.
2. Portal Update: We are now fully deploying our portal with Defang alone using the defang compose up command. Our original portal architecture was designed before we supported managed storage so we used to use Pulumi to provision and connect external storage. But since we added support in Compose to specify managed storage, we can fully describe our Portal using Compose alone. This has allowed us to rip out hundreds of lines of code and heavily simplify our deployments. To learn more about how we do this, check out our Defang-Deployed-with-Defang (Part 1) blog.
3. Open-Auth Contribution: In the past couple months we have been communicating with the OpenAuth maintainers and contributors via PRs (#120, #156) and Issues (#127) to enable features like local testing with DynamoDB, enabling support for scopes, improving standards alignment, supporting Redis, and more. We are rebuilding our authentication systems around OpenAuth and are excited about the future of the project.

Events and Social Media

February was an exciting month for the Defang team as we continued to engage with the developer community and showcase what’s possible with Defang. We sponsored and demo’ed at the DevTools Vancouver meetup, as well as sponsored the Vancouver.dev IRL: Building AI Startups event. Also, at the AWS Startup Innovation Showcase in Vancouver, our CTO Lio demonstrated how Defang makes it effortless to deploy secure, scalable, and cost-efficient serverless apps on AWS! And finally, we had a great response to our LinkedIn post on the Model Context Protocol, catching the attention of many observers, including some of our key partners.

We are eager to see what you deploy with Defang. Join our Discord to ask any questions, see what others are building, and share your own experience with Defang. And stay tuned for more to come in March!