StackGen Inc. today threw down the gauntlet to the infrastructure-as-code industry with the official launch of its Autonomous Infrastructure Platform, which uses artificial intelligence agents to build and manage cloud computing environments automatically at scale.

The startup, which rebranded from AppCD earlier this year, is looking to transform the way cloud-based technology infrastructure is designed, deployed and managed, in order to overcome a “critical bottleneck” that it says costs as much as $20 billion annually across the broader cloud industry.

In particular, StackGen says it’s building on advances in “infrastructure-as-code” or IaC, which is a discipline that involves managing and provisioning information technology infrastructure using code instead of manual processes. With IaC, developers and system engineers can create simple scripts that automate the configuration of cloud-based servers, eliminating the need to set them up manually, which can be incredibly time consuming.

IaC has gained a lot of momentum, but StackGen believes that it introduces its own problems. The need to create those scripts manually has become almost as burdensome as performing all of the manual settings involved in configuring clouds the old way.

This burden is becoming more pronounced as AI accelerates application development velocities. With applications being built and updated faster than ever, the need to constantly set up and refine the supporting cloud infrastructure prevents them from being deployed as soon as they’re ready. This is what StackGen is trying to address, using AI agents that understand each customer’s specific infrastructure context and organization standards in order to automate how their application environments are created and managed.

“The infrastructure bottleneck has become the primary constraint on software delivery velocity,” said Chief Product Officer Asif Awan.

Cloud infrastructure agents

StackGen’s AI agents attempt to overcome this bottleneck by automatically generating the IaC scripts for each application. The StackBuilder agent is available now and simply looks at the codebase and understands its intent, the company said, enabling “infrastructure operates itself” with full compliance and automated pipeline fixes. Once the infrastructure has been set up and deployed, the StackGuard agent — launching later this year — ensures everything is compliant, enforcing the organization’s policies by scanning for any violations and recommending fixes.

There’s a self-healing aspect to StackGen too, with StackHealer ensuring that the infrastructure keeps ticking over as it should. In case any problems arise that impact an application’s performance, it will immediately launch an automatic investigation to find out what’s causing it, reducing mean time to resolution to under five minutes, the company said.

Meanwhile, the StackOptimizer agent (available later this year) attempts to continuously maintain the customer’s optimal balance between cost and performance. By constantly analyzing the infrastructure, it can make recommendations around resizing instances, for example, or architecture alterations, to ensure the customer’s goals are met.

Customers can choose the level of autonomy they desire too, so they can begin with a Copilot that simply makes recommendations. Those are then approved or rejected by human operators, and later move to full automation with an Autopilot that takes actions on their behalf.

According to StackGen, it provides direct benefits to various enterprise teams. Developers can accelerate the deployment of new apps and updates, while platform engineers can spend less time trying to reduce infrastructure overheads and configuration drift, increasing their productivity by up to ten-times. Site reliability engineers can get to the bottom of incidents faster, while chief technology officers and engineering leaders will see increased organizational velocity as a result.

Chief Executive Sachin Aggarwal said the company is really pioneering an entirely new software category that will move the cloud industry beyond legacy infrastructure flows.

“While AI transforms every aspect of business, infrastructure teams remain stuck with manual processes that can’t keep pace with AI-accelerated development,” he pointed out. “Our Autonomous Infrastructure Platform doesn’t just solve today’s problems, it defines what enterprise infrastructure should look like in an AI-first world.”

Images: StackGen