Encore Cloud 2.0 - Development Platform for the AI Era

Source: Dev.to

Encore Cloud 2.0 – Launch Announcement

We started Encore five years ago because developers were spending too much time configuring infrastructure and jumping through hoops, not building products.
That problem persists. AI agents can now scaffold entire backends in minutes, but running them well—with proper observability, reliable, secure infrastructure across multiple environments—still requires significant work.

Today, we’re launching Encore Cloud 2.0, a big upgrade to our development platform that understands your code and automates the operations layer.

The Problem

Before we get into what’s new, let’s expand on why we built Encore. What’s wrong with existing tools like Terraform?

• AI can already help write Terraform, but its usefulness is limited because it lacks context.
• For most teams, the “truth” of a system is scattered: business logic lives in one place, infrastructure definitions in another, permissions somewhere else, plus the inevitable manual changes in cloud consoles.
• There’s no single authoritative model of how the system runs.

Without such a model, common questions require significant human effort:

• Which services actually need to talk?
• What permissions are truly required?
• How can we be sure this infra change won’t break something?

Fragmentation turns operating your system into a game of “spot the difference” between your intent and your infrastructure.

Framework‑Defined Infrastructure

Encore solves this by making application code the single source of truth for everything that impacts behavior, allowing us to derive a complete system model automatically.

• We provide an open‑source backend framework for TypeScript and Go with packages to define services, APIs, and infrastructure (databases, message queues, scheduled jobs).
• Unlike Terraform, you don’t define specific cloud resources, configurations, or providers in code—you only express what matters to the application.

// Example in Encore.ts
new SQLDatabase("users")          // creates a database
@api()                             // decorates an API endpoint

From this code, Encore Cloud automatically orchestrates:

• Cloud Resources: Databases, caches, queues
• IAM Policies: Least‑privilege permissions, generated automatically
• Networking: Service discovery and secure connectivity
• Observability: Tracing and metrics, wired out of the box
• Documentation: Service catalog, API docs, architecture diagrams

Because infrastructure details aren’t embedded in your code, the same application can run in different environments without modification. You create an environment in Encore Cloud, choose the provider (AWS or Google Cloud) and the runtime model (Kubernetes or serverless), and Encore provisions resources with sane defaults. You can fine‑tune them in Encore Cloud or directly in the cloud provider—they won’t be overwritten.

Trade‑offs

You give up low‑level control over individual cloud resources in exchange for productivity, portability, and system‑level safety.

• Teams that need to hand‑tune every resource may prefer Terraform.
• Teams that want to focus on application behavior and evolve infrastructure without rewrites will find Encore optimal, with easy‑to‑reach knobs for key configurations.

Because your code is the source of truth, drift is effectively eliminated:

• Missing infrastructure → automatically provisioned
• Removed resources → marked “unused” for safe deletion

But what about lock‑in?
We’re engineers too, so we designed Encore to reduce lock‑in from the start. Learn more about migrating away:

What’s New in 2.0

Encore Cloud 2.0 builds on five years of foundation and delivers a platform that feels less like “managing servers” and more like shipping product.

1. Redesigned Operations Dashboard

The dashboard now reflects how engineers think about systems. It lets you navigate large, distributed applications across multiple environments, surfacing topology, deployments, and infrastructure state without the noise.

2. Full‑Stack Observability

For teams using Encore.ts, metrics now live alongside traces and logs, giving a complete, correlated view of system behavior across services. No external agents to install, no dashboards to configure manually.

3. System Transparency

Because Encore understands your system model, it maintains the artifacts that usually go stale. In this release we’ve improved the performance and usability of these tools:

• Architecture Diagrams: Always up‑to‑date, generated from the live graph.
• Service Catalog: A real‑time inventory of what’s running.
• Local MCP Server: Allows AI agents to inspect your system and take actions such as calling endpoints, viewing traces, and more.

4. Zero‑Friction Onboarding

We’ve streamlined the path from “new repo” to “production URL.” With tighter GitHub integration, you can go from code to a fully provisioned cloud environment in minutes.

Jump In

Encore Cloud 2.0 is available now.

• Deploy an example app to a free development environment.
• Book a demo to see how it works with a production system.

For teams already using Encore, the 2.0 dashboard features are rolling out automatically. Update to the latest CLI version using:

encore version update

to start using metrics in Encore.ts.

Metrics Upgrade (for teams already using Encore.go)

If you already have metrics available, you’ll receive an upgraded dashboard with more performant and usable graphs.