OpsCanvas Inc. today debuted a new “draw and deploy” platform that helps small and medium-sized businesses with the daunting task of configuring and deploying cloud infrastructure, automating infrastructure-as-code configurations.

The OpsCanvas platform provides engineering and DevOps teams the ability to visually diagram their application architecture and from that it can create IaC, which can greatly reduce the effort needed to set up and deploy to the cloud.

Normally, preparing to deploy applications and infrastructure can take hours of manually diagramming, scripting, preparing connectors and configuration. OpsCanvas can generate more than 10,000 lines of “known-good” custom configuration in less than 30 seconds, thus reducing the risk and toil of manual configurations.

OpsCanvas was co-founded by Chief Executive Officer Brian Kathman and Chief Technology Officer Jason Turim, both of whom previously launched Signal Vine Inc., a software-as-a-service messaging company focused on higher education. Kathman and Turim told SiliconANGLE in an interview that while building the Signal Vine platform, they saw that one of the biggest challenges was how complex and thorny it was deploying software to the cloud.

“We just thought there had to be a better way,” Kathman said. “And we know a lot of people have been trying to find the better way for a while.”

OpsCanvas in particular focuses on small and medium-sized businesses to provide them a way to get into the cloud deployment game because most of the platform engineering tools on the market are aimed at large enterprises. That means smaller businesses buy a cloud deployment platform and work to custom-build their deployment, but it might take them months to get online. With OpsCanvas, they could simply draw their service architecture and the platform takes care of the rest, the company says.

OpsCanvas takes all the numerous steps of cloud deployment and turns them into one-click automation by letting a company pick out each of its various services and drag-and-drop them onto a visual canvas — thus the name of the company. This can include provisioning managed services to spinning up containerized applications and microservices. The platform will also manage deploying, cloning, updating rolling back, extending and decommissioning resources.

“Our perspective is that our users have containerized their software,” said Turim. “So, there’s a lot of tools that require a stack.”

The system itself is agnostic as to the language and can deploy in Haskell and Clojure, Turim said, if that’s what the company wants, as long as they’re containerized. Aside from preparing containerized services, the platform also configures and deploys network connections between them using best practices as well.

“The idea is that it’s software team that’s building this diagram, they’re the ones that know how their services should be configured,” said Turim. “And what managed services they need, so that we don’t think that it’s a heavy lift on behalf of the software team, because this is all stuff they know.”

After all, most teams already have this diagram somewhere, in a Visio document, on a whiteboard, on pieces of paper in a folder, or in their heads.

Right now, OpsCanvas is starting with Amazon Web Services, but Turim said the company has plans eventually to support other cloud services depending on customer demand.

Kathman said he believes OpsCanvas will help businesses by providing a SaaS platform. That means that they can have a smaller cloud engineering teams of people who don’t need to be cloud deployment experts. That will allow them to get to market faster than if they bought a full solution out of a box.

“By creating this subscription access basis, it allows companies to get up and running faster,” Kathman said, “Their day one is of value. They can actually sign up with OpsCanvas and be deploying software into their cloud account… that afternoon. And that allows them to save time and money.”

Images: rawpixel/Freepik, OpsCanvas