Zeet Expands Beyond the App Platforms with New Blueprints Launch

Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs)

Zeet Expands Beyond the App Platforms with New Blueprints Launch

Deploying “apps” isn’t enough for the cloud-native world we live in - so we’re launching our newest feature: Blueprints. Whether you’re an experienced infrastructure engineer, or an application developer who has no infrastructure experience, Blueprints empower you to create the infrastructure you need.

To summarize Blueprints in two sentences: Blueprints wrap your IaC to make your custom Projects compatible with any cloud, all through the Zeet Developer Platform; get your own personal PaaS, in your cloud(s), with your custom infrastructure. If you need to deploy something fairly standard, you can also use one of our ours— we’re launching a dozen open-source Blueprints for you to get started.

For infrastructure engineers, creating Blueprints is trivial. Why? You’ve already done the work! Any Terraform module can be transformed into a Blueprint, with support for additional IaC providers coming soon. Bundle the repeated work you’re doing so that anyone on your team can create infrastructure that is properly configured and compliant with your guidelines. If you don’t want to start from scratch, or aren’t as familiar with IaC you can use one of Zeet’s Official Blueprints to deploy services with little-to-no tweaking on your part.

Why Blueprints?

There are thousands of ways to deploy code, but at the end of the day developers just want to get their code to production.

That was our thesis as well. We’ve spent the last 2 years building in that direction—I have code, I want infrastructure that code can live on, and I want to deploy my code to that infrastructure. Zeet built a great way to do that, and it worked. Over the last 2 months alone, we’ve seen a 500% increase in the number of applications deployed on Zeet, and over the last 18 months that number is closer to 6000%.

Zeet Apps are pre-configured templates to deploy common application services like websites, backends - you know, web apps. But what about databases, queues, load balancers, etc.—those aren’t applications, but they’re just as important for scaling your business, no? Those non-Apps have always been second class citizens, and not just within Zeet.

Across the industry, there are dozens of dev tools. If you’re building at any real level of scale, you probably end up spread across these tools, plumbing them together to make your applications work. Unless you have thousands of engineers and can afford to build a platform engineering team, managing infrastructure is either your entire world or completely inaccessible.

When we noticed how many engineering organizations there are using disjointed devtools to build a cohesive workflow, we knew that something needed to be done. It’s not just us who believe this either—according to Gartner “by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery.”

Blueprints

There needs to be a world where you can deploy code, but also all the infrastructure to support it. Not only that, but it shouldn’t be a choice between a Platform as a Service (think Vercel, Heroku, Netlify) or doing everything yourself. This got us thinking: what if you could deploy… anything? When we say anything, we generally mean anything—if it can be deployed, you can create a Blueprint for it.

Databases, ETH nodes, domino's pizza orders. 2/3 of those may actually be interesting to you (dealer’s choice), but all 3 of those are now being deployed live in production on the Zeet Developer Platform. We’ve branded this concept as Blueprints.

Infrastructure engineers can bring their expertise — security, compliance, and orchestration configuration — to create Blueprints that anyone in their engineering organization can leverage. App Developers can use those Blueprints to create services without needing to ask the DevOps team for help every step of the way. Everybody wins.

To sum it up, Blueprints is a way to package up all of the high value IaC work done by infrastructure engineers, and the Zeet Developer Platform makes those Blueprints easily accessible to application developers, so they can build new compliant, cloud-native services independently.

Zeet as your Developer Platform

Zeet started as an easy way to deploy software applications, and it will still be that, but it’s also a lot more now. With growing demand for dev tools that solve one problem, Zeet aims to be the dev tool that solves all of them.

From FAANG Engineering Leaders, to practicing Platform Engineers who already maintain high performance developer platforms, everyone we spoke to agrees that a consolidated, easy-to-use Developer Platform is becoming a necessity. There is no build vs buy decision right now. If you’re a big team, you build one, and if you don’t build one, you don’t have one. With Blueprints, there’s a path to operational excellence that doesn’t require hiring a dedicated team.

Blueprints allow everyone to win. Platform engineering get to do the work they’re good at - building infrastructure systems - and reap the benefits of a world-class infrastructure team thinking about automation + interface 24/7, while developers get to focus on building the applications they love and not the nitty gritty.

Want to learn more? Try Blueprints today for free, or send us a note.