When your software runs inside your customer's cloud, it needs real values to start: endpoints, connection strings, API keys. Some of them are yours. Some only the customer's admin has.

Deployment inputs let you declare every one of them in alien.ts. Each input says what it is, how it's validated, and who provides it.

const inputs = alien.inputs({
  databaseUrl: alien.string({
    providedBy: "deployer",
    required: true,
    label: "Database URL",
    description: "Postgres connection string inside the customer's network.",
    pattern: "^postgres://",
    env: "DATABASE_URL",
  }),
  controlPlaneApiKey: alien.secret({
    providedBy: "developer",
    required: true,
    label: "Control plane API key",
    description: "Authorizes this deployment with your control plane.",
    env: "CONTROL_PLANE_API_KEY",
  }),
})

The important part is providedBy, which decides who gets asked:

• developer values are collected on your side, and the customer never sees them.
• deployer values are asked of the customer's admin at install time, because they're specific to their own environment.

From that one declaration, Alien validates each value and collects it everywhere setup happens: the dashboard, deployment portal, CLI, CloudFormation, Terraform, and Helm. Types cover strings, secrets, numbers, integers, booleans, enums, and lists, and secrets stay masked, encrypted at rest, and out of generated IaC and logs.

Read the docs →

Debug remotely with the new alien debug command. It opens a secure channel into your customer's cloud and lets you run the CLIs you already use against it, so a remote environment behaves like another region in your own.

• Secure channel into your customer's cloud
• No open ports or inbound networking
• Works with aws, gcloud, az, and kubectl
• Least-privilege management permissions only
• Optional approvals from the customer's admins

Read the docs →

Alien now collects logs from all your remote BYOC deployments into an object storage bucket you own. Stream them live and search history from the dashboard, the same across AWS, GCP, Azure, and Kubernetes.

The hardest part of BYOC usually isn't the deployment. It's everything after it.

Observability docs →

Today we're launching the Alien Platform: deploy your software into your customers' clouds and operate it from one place, with updates, monitoring, and remote debugging.

You define what runs in a customer's environment once. Alien generates white-labeled deployment options (CloudFormation, Login with Google, Terraform, Helm, bring-your-own Kubernetes, airgapped), installable through a deployment portal on your own domain. Updates roll out to every deployment automatically across AWS, GCP, Azure, and on-prem.

We also raised a $5M seed from Basis Set, Jibe, and angels at OpenAI, Google, and Databricks.

Read the docs →

We're happy to announce the first version of Alien, an open-source platform for deploying your software into your customers' own environments and keeping it fully managed. Still very early.

The software runs in the customer's environment, so their data stays private, but you keep operating it: deployments, updates, monitoring, and debugging stay centralized. Targets AWS, GCP, and Azure.

• GitHub
• Quickstart
• How Alien works