Software development has never been easy, but it hasn’t always been this painful.

It’s a bit of a paradox. As public clouds gain traction and tooling abstracts away the messiest bits of infrastructure, it should be easier than ever for developers to deploy their apps. That’s the promise of the cloud — the freedom to build without worrying about infrastructure.

Instead, developers are spending more time struggling to configure and use the cloud than actually creating their applications on top of it. Every new tool requires more expertise to use, more time to master, and more layers to leak in the background. As an audience grows, the pain intensifies. Instead of being a cause for celebration, scaling introduces a whole new world of cost and complexity.

In the face of such intense management challenges, team sizes bloat and more and more developers waste away writing endless epics in YAML. When things break they tend to break in obscure ways that require specific infrastructure expertise to fix — expertise many teams don’t have. Incredible things are possible with the cloud, but without the right people and resources to burn, most of those incredible things are unachievable.

We believe the edge and public clouds are vital utilities for makers of all sizes, utilities that should be easy to manage and access. It’s become clear that something is missing.

That something is Seaplane.

We’re building a user-centric control plane — a "c" (sea) plane! 🛫  — that continuously optimizes the use of global infrastructure to deliver applications where and when they are needed, resiliently and performantly.

Our goal is to do for full stack applications what Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) did for media delivery: make it simple, make it global, and make it cost proportional to your traffic. Seaplane is for makers everywhere, whether you’re running a simple website or an application that needs 10 petaflops of compute and 10 petabytes of data within 10 milliseconds of every end-user on the planet.

How it works

With a single Seaplane deployment, you can transparently use every major public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP, DO, OCI) across every region, distributed bare metal providers, and the Seaplane global edge network.

Once deployed with Seaplane, containers hit our global edge network which serves as an ingress and execution layer for the hottest resource needs for your application. From there we can strategically deploy your containerized workloads to the best multi-region Cloud and Edge resources based on your budget, business/regulatory restrictions, user traffic patterns, and performance requirements.

Instead of guessing where you think your end users will be, we deploy your applications where they actually are. As traffic shifts, we shift, autoscaling to match demand and preventing waste in the process. This also applies if there’s an outage — if a provider goes down in one region, your application will remain available as we automatically and strategically combine available capacity to weather the turbulence. If all nearby capacity fails, your users will still be able to access your applications from the nearest available zone automatically and seamlessly. Unlike traditional disaster recovery models, which focus on manual changeovers and reactive measures, Seaplane preempts disaster entirely by providing every application with optimally mixed capacity. Apps deployed on Seaplane are inherently more resilient as they run across multiple regions, clouds, and bare metal providers.

If you need more control you can restrict workloads to specific cloud providers, countries, or even entire regions. We provide all the levers you need to comply with current and future regulatory requirements.

Manage what you want, automate what you don’t. Seaplane let’s you take control of your destiny, without micromanaging your destiny’s infrastructure.

How it scales

Seaplane enables you to maintain your development and shipping velocity without the need to pause and consider which regions or customers to serve next. As your audience grows, so do your deployments. If users start cropping up in new regions, we automatically spin up the best resources to serve those users based on cost and performance. There’s no guesswork, and no risk of overinvesting or underinvesting in new markets.

With Seaplane your user base can grow organically and globally, without forcing some users to have a suboptimal experience until they reach a critical mass. Expand to new markets based on your business goals, not your infrastructure restrictions.

What it costs

With current market offerings, multi-region and multi-cloud deployments are incredibly expensive. The sticker prices are high, the bills are convoluted, and the operational cost is immense and ongoing. You need a lot of money and a lot of infrastructure people just to manage two regions, let alone two clouds.

Seaplane removes that operational cost by making multi-region and multi-cloud deployments simple. There’s no additional heavy lifting, all you have to do is deploy once and you’re deployed everywhere. You only pay for the services you need and the resources you use. Everything is metered, and because you’re not picking regions or juggling providers there’s no fear of overprovisioning.

Check out our pricing page for details and breakdowns.

What’s next?

More releases more often. We’ve spoken with hundreds of engineers and product teams from across the industry, and our roadmap reflects those conversations. We spent a lot of time diving deep into the aches and pains of cloud management, and while we don’t want to give too much away, we can say you should check back often — we’re always doing something new!

You can subscribe to our newsletter for updates on new releases, or you can contact us for early access.

Software development has never been easy, but with the right solution, it can still be fun.