A Short Introduction to the Monk Ecosystem
Tl;dr Monk is a toolset that allows you to manage your infrastructure with deployable whiteboards, command line tools, and an AI DevOps autonomous agent. Sign up for our open beta to try our tools out.
Today we’re going to talk about what Monk is and what its ecosystem of tools provides. Monk’s interfaces are:
- Monk’s AI agent (invite-only)
- Monk’s whiteboard GUI
- Monk CLI and manifests
Monk in action
Having a command line, web app, and agent all sound great, right? Let’s look at a real deployment in our whiteboard and examine.
This is a simple Monk deployment for Directus. Here we can see:
- The whiteboard that displays the architecture of the deployment.
In this case, the deployment is a multi-cloud deployment with DigitalOcean and Google Cloud. This deployment, and any other, can be done in either with a single cloud provider, multiple, or on your own hosted cloud. - The kits that are used to build the application and its services.
Kits are packages that describe software and infrastructure and APIs.
The specific kits here are for a Redis cache, Postgres database, and the Directus server itself. For demo purposes, the cache and database are on an instance separate from the server. For more information about kits, please check out the kit blog post. - A code preview of the generated code to build the deployment.
The manifest itself is written in our simple, expressive language, MonkScript. The supporting code above is a brief example. - All Monk tools are built on monkOS.
monkOS is our distributed cloud operating system. It is multi-cloud by default and a typical cluster can include on-premise machines. monkOS is built to handle classic cloud deployments as well as those made by our Monk AI agent. Check out our monkOS doc for more information!
What about the command line?
If you prefer to work in the terminal, you can use our command line. Just like the whiteboard is designed to be intuitive, our command line tools use familiar commands for building and managing your clusters.
What about Monk X?
Monk X is our invite-only AI DevOps Agent. Our goal is for Monk X to be like a smart teammate that understands your system and brings the collective DevOps intelligence. Monk X understands what your application needs by reading the source code. It perceives the optimal infrastructure around it and builds it in any cloud. Any service, simple or complex, any programming language. All you need to do is to click “Deploy”.
Monk X is able to optimize her recommendations using natural language and is always running. You do not need to use the “right phrasing” or “the right keywords” - Monk X has been trained to understand everything from “is there a kit for Postgres?” to “deploy with MongoDB on a small DigitalOcean instance” and “move this deployment to a private network”. Whether you’re looking for a quick answer about Monk or for best practices on your specific deployment, Monk X can help.
Who should care about Monk?
If you’re wondering if Monk is right for you and your team, ask yourself these questions:
- Have you ever wished each developer on your team was able to deploy directly to the cloud?
- Have you ever wished your DevOps could scale themselves and make their expertise scalable and reusable across all the devs?
- Have your DevOps team spend hours setting up dev environments for all your devs?
- Have you ever wanted to show architecture design patterns, so that we (as an industry) didn’t need to learn the same lessons multiple times in different silos?
- Are you a startup, working lean, and need help scaling the knowledge of the engineers you do have?
- Are you at a larger business, and need to quickly and effectively communicate about different environments across teams and departments?
- Have you ever needed a quick way to explain the architecture of one or more environments? Either to a new colleague, or someone who works on a completely different team or org?
- Do you have an interest in AI tooling?
- Does AI DevOps sound interesting to you?
If you answered “yes”, or even “YES!!!!”, to one or more of the above, then Monk is for you.
Where do I go from here?
If you want to get started today, then you can:
- Join our Open Beta
- When you sign up for an account it will allow you to use both the whiteboard and command line tools.
- Join our Discord
- This will provide support from the Monk staff as well as the broader Monk Community
- Want an invite to the Monk X agent? The first 1,000 Monk.io signups come with a Monk X invite.
- For entire teams: Sign up for a Monk Lunch & Learn!