Introduction

Moving To The Cloud Isn't Easy

Planning, designing and deploying your brand new infrastructure into the cloud is not easy or quick. This is mainly for 2 reasons, firstly the current IaC tools available are not intuitive and take considerable time to learn well. Secondly most IaC tools have little to no intelligence, they will literally deploy exactly what you instruct them too. Because of these limitations you will face many technical challenges along the way, especially for small and medium businesses. In addition to the technical challenges, you will encounter others on the way such as compliance and resourcing. There is a skills shortage for good developers and architects, both of which are typically required for most cloud migrations.

How is JustDeploy Different?

With all the challenges above, a new evolution of IaC tools is required. Many years ago these were called expert systems, but ultimately cloud is about deploying a lot of well architected deployments (boilerplate templates) and this knowledge can be put into the product.

• Simplicity. Instead of learning a new programming/declarative language, JustDeploy leverages common and familiar languages/tools already in existence and typically already known by your engineers. You can describe your infrastructure using YAML or JSON with many others on the road map, such as SQL, Azure AppConfig, AWS AppConfig and more.


• Consistency. Public clouds are developed by huge teams globally, this results in inconsistencies in features and IaC tools. JustDeploy hides this from you by offering consistency with each cloud and where possible across clouds. Consistency is important when learning.


• Intelligence. Most existing IaC tools just deploy exactly what you tell them to deploy. There is a general lack of intelligence in the tools. They will not generate best practice for you, you will need to know best practice so you can tell the tool exactly how and what to deploy. They will not validate correctly, there is nothing more frustrating than trying to deploy an infrastructure only to have it fail half way through because you find out a specific SKU you need is not available in the region you are using.

JustDeploy is a community project to help promote the above issues and solutions. JustDeploy is an IaC accelerator focused on helping you deploy your infrastructure with as little IaC coding knowledge as possible in a best practice way. JustDeploy will implement features using the relevant cloud frameworks and best practice methods. I believe there are a few unique features on the road map, and of course great support for databases.