Deployment Modes

info

Deployment modes are now part of the broader Recipe concept. See Recipe for the full details, including a comparison of what each built-in recipe configures.

affordable, balanced, and high_availability are Defang's three built-in recipes — presets of infrastructure-as-code parameters that trade off cost against resiliency. You can select one with the --mode CLI flag, which defaults to affordable:

defang compose up --mode=high_availability

Tier Requirements

Mode	Required Plan
Affordable	Available on all tiers (Starter, Pro, Enterprise)
Balanced	Requires Pro ($49/mo) or Enterprise
High Availability	Requires Enterprise ($499/mo)

tip

While the --mode flag still works, the recommended way to choose a mode is to configure a stack, which records the provider, region, and mode for a deployment so you don't have to pass these flags on every command.

Recipes generalize and supersede this fixed set of modes by letting you set the underlying infrastructure parameters directly. See the Recipe concept for more information.