Today, after more than a year in development, we’re introducing the next major version of our product.
During the past few years, we’ve been trying to create a platform that allows developers to deploy their apps entirely on their own without having to do any DevOps.
But this doesn't work in practice. There are too many moving parts. We can abstract 90% of them 90% of the time, but that’s not good enough.
So, we can’t abstract DevOps completely. But we can make it and order-of-magnitude more developer-friendly:
- Writing 100s or 1000s of lines of different YAML files -> write 10s of lines of a simple & concise config
- Having to understand many different technologies (Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, etc.) and infrastructure concepts (networking, VPCs) -> use 1 technology that includes only easy-to-understand abstractions
- Manual work of deploying & managing apps -> Simple app management in a console UI, including push-to-deploy capabilities, logs browser, infrastructure costs breakdown, one-click-rollbacks, etc.
One thing we're particularly proud of is our config-builder. It’s a monaco-editor (the one powering VSCode) with built-in IntelliSense for Stacktape configuration (autocomplete, validation, on-hover documentation, etc). Prefer GUI? Start with a preset - we have one for most use cases. Then, configure the missing parts using dropdowns, validated input fields, etc. This way, you can configure even the most complicated infrastructures in minutes, and the chance you make a mistake is near zero. You can try it directly on our main website (even though it's even better when it has access to your git repository).
So what is Stacktape? It's a Platform as a Service 2.0 that runs in your own AWS account. It combines the user experience of a PaaS provider (such as Heroku or Render) with the flexibility of a do-it-yourself approach.
If you have any feedback or if there's something missing in Stacktape, I am all ears.
