OpsCanvas, Inc. today emerged from stealth to unveil a Draw & Deploy platform that generates code to provision cloud infrastructure.
OpsCanvas CEO Brian Kathman said as an alternative to traditional infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools, this offering makes DevOps practices more accessible to a wider number of organizations.
The OpsCanvas platform analyzes application architecture diagrams to deterministically create known-good code that the company has vetted to replace scripts DevOps teams would otherwise have to create. The platform then, via a single click, makes it possible to automate common tasks for deploying, cloning, updating, rolling back, extending and decommissioning resources.
Unlike generative artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, OpsCanvas does not use a large language model (LLM) to generate code. Instead, vetted code is created based on the diagrams that the platform creates. OpsCanvas also encodes best practices, standardized network topology for applications and provides integration with multiple continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms.
As a result, DevOps teams are provided with a comprehensive view of diagrams, including the number of stored versions and deployment status, for every application deployed.
The goal is to enable organizations of any size to manage entire DevOps workflows using a platform that can generate more than 10,000 lines of already-tested, custom configurations in less than 30 seconds, said Kathman.
In effect, OpsCanvas aims to democratize DevOps by eliminating the need for specialized skills to provision and deploy applications. In addition to accelerating the pace at which applications are built and deployed, that approach will also make it feasible for more small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) to embrace DevOps, noted Kathman.
Regardless of the path chosen to make DevOps more accessible, the days when software engineers wrote scripts to provision cloud infrastructure are now numbered. Either using code that has been vetted by platforms such as OpsCanvas or relying on co-pilots to generate code using large language models (LLMs), provisioning and deploying applications is about to become both simpler and more secure.
Many of the cybersecurity issues that organizations experience today can be traced back to misconfigured infrastructure provisioned by developers using IaC tools. As generative capabilities become more widely used, the quality of the code used to provision infrastructure should substantially improve. As that transition occurs, DevOps engineers should be able to allocate more of their time to address more complex challenges.
One way or another, DevOps is about to become less tedious in ways that should help reduce burnout that leads to turnover. At the same time, the number of organizations capable of embracing DevOps best practices should increase as it becomes simpler for IT administrators who lack programming skills to provision infrastructure.
In fact, the velocity at which software is built and deployed today is about to exponentially increase in a way that most DevOps professionals never imagined might be possible.