Out Now! Stacked Up: The IaC Maturity Report Learn More
March 5, 2024 •Sachin Aggarwal
Imagine a scenario (which I believe many of you are familiar with) where a platform team at an enterprise is struggling to keep up with development velocity while enforcing standards. The cause? The engineering teams rely on the same tools to provision infrastructure as they have over the past few years. Ideally, the platform team has everyone using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform. Unfortunately, the development teams are struggling to adopt it. Why? Because Terraform can be hard for developers to learn and become experts in. They, after all, are hired to create applications.
Platform engineering is increasingly becoming popular amongst enterprises seeking to improve productivity, governance and compliance at scale and profitability. While these teams are excellent at creating templates and providing a framework to accelerate application deployment, teams are still burdened with creating and using Infrastructure as Code (IaC). We all know writing IaC is manual, time consuming, error-prone and requires expertise.
We love IaC, but it requires some improvements to remove bottlenecks, reduce risk, and lessen cognitive load.
Today I’m excited to announce the launch of StackGen! We are on a mission to remove the burden of infrastructure as code by auto-generating it from application code with golden standards (policy, security and compliance standards) applied.
Why Now?
With 100m+ developers on GitHub and the explosion of cloud native development propelled by the use of Gen AI and Co-Pilots, organizations are scaling DevOps and platform engineers to create and maintain standards and get applications deployed faster and more securely.
We must get applications to market quickly to meet customer demand. Any unnecessary delay can mean lost competitive edge or revenue. DevOps teams are serving teams of hundreds of engineers, but for every code commit there can be manual review to check IaC. And often automation comes in the form of deployment pipelines and not the underlying configuration of infrastructure, creating a lot of back and forth between misaligned DevOps and developers.
We need to ensure that infrastructure provisioning is streamlined, secure by default, and aligned across an organization.
Introducing StackGen!
StackGen is our answer to the challenges of IaC. We developed Generative Infrastructure from Code™ (IfC). StackGen generates (IfC) automatically based on application code with golden standards applied to ensure alignment across internal and external policies.
How Are We Different?
Unlike manual IaC creation or “golden templates”, StackGen auto-generates IaC from the application code itself to standardize and streamline cloud deployments. No application source code changes are needed, and there’s no new programming languages to learn for IaC.
StackGen early access offers a developer edition where you can connect your own repo to generate IaC, and a CLI to try it locally.
How StackGen Works
StackGen will analyze, visualize, and generate your IaC for you based on your application code.
- StackGen analyzes the code to understand an application's required infrastructure, including cloud dependencies, the required APIs, service configuration, ingress and egress, dependencies, and environment variables.
- StackGen provides a visualization of the deployment architecture, and enables customization through a simple drag-and-drop functionality enhanced by built-in guardrails and resource validation.
- StackGen generates Terraform or Helm charts based on the application code and applies golden standards automatically at creation, complying with SOC 2, HIPAA, NIST-CSF, PCI, GDPR regulations, and AWS WAF.
Our Vision
My co-founder, Asif Awan, and I joined forces in 2023 because we believed we could solve the challenges around IaC that we had struggled with in previous organizations. Crucial to our journey is hiring an expert team. We have the creator of Terrascan, ex-Hashicorp employees, CNCF ambassadors, and DevOps authors and speakers. Collectively, we hold deep knowledge and understanding of how crucial improving application deployment is to achieving business goals, especially at scale.
Our vision is to enable any user to securely deploy applications to any cloud without delay by being application-centric, cloud-agnostic, and developer-first. And we have the team to do it!
Backed by the Best
As we launch, we also announce our $6M in seed funding by notable venture capital firms Thomvest Ventures, WestWave Capital, FireBolt, and Secure Octane. The seed round will help us speed product development, drive our go-to-market strategy, and fuel company growth.
I’m excited for the StackGen journey. I know that we will help organizations (and you) by providing the next disruption in application deployment: generative infrastructure from code so you can be more profitable, secure, and productive.