Cloudomation Engine provides a lot of functionality that makes it faster and easier to write and run Python-based automations in a sustainable and maintainable way. This includes:

• Job control
• Runtime environment with SLAs
• User Interface(s)
• Secrets management
• Configuration management
• Master Data Management
• Standard connectors to lots of other tools, APIs and protocols
• Monitoring & notifications
• Custom APIs
• Scheduling
• Mocking
• Role-based access control

And a range of other features that make it possible to automate with production quality with just a few lines of Python.

Yes. As a Python-based framework, you should know at least some Python to use Cloudomation effectively. However, we do offer consulting to develop templates or even implement entire platforms as a service for you. From version 12 onward, Cloudomation also features an AI assistant and code completion that enable you to be effective with the framework even if your Python knowledge is limited.

Yes, Cloudomation Engine is a platform orchestrator and can do everything Humanitec can do (and more). We prefer the term “platform backend” because every engineer understands what a backend is and it describes well what Cloudomation Engine can do. Humanitec coined the term “platform orchestrator” for its own tool, which is a graph-based workflow orchestration tool. Cloudomation Engine is not graph based, instead allowing users to model their configurations in a “normal” relational data model. The entities in the data models used in Engine also have relationships with each other (like a graph), but allow you to associate lots of other attributes with each entity (equivalent to a node in a graph, if you prefer to think about it like that), making it more powerful and flexible than a purely graph-based model.

Any standard that can be used in Python can be used with Engine.

Yes. Cloudomation Engine is a framework that allows you to build all of those things. Primarily, Cloudomation Engine is a platform orchestrator that ties together all the tools and pipelines you already have in your IDP, including your developer portal. In addition, you can use Cloudomation Engine to build additional pipelines and services for your IDP. Optionally, you can use Cloudomation DevStack to provide Cloud Development Environments for your Engineers.

These are the reasons to use Cloudomation to build your IDP, in addition to the open source tools you already use:

• One tool instead of many: Due to its broad feature set including workflow automation, state management, configuration, API and CDE management, Cloudomation enables platform engineers to solve many of their challenges within one unified framework instead of a patchwork of many different open source solutions. Having one unified framework that covers many use cases means faster implementation and much easier maintenance of your platform long-term.
• No glue code: Building an IDP usually means writing a lot of “glue code” that ties the individual tools, components and services in your stack together. This glue code is often the most fragile and difficult to maintain part of the developer platform. Cloudomation is primarily built to replace this glue code, offering one framework to write, monitor and manage scripts in one place.
• Unique features: There are some things Cloudomation can do, that open source tools can’t:
  • Custom objects with custom life cycles: State management is difficult, and (open source) tools to manage state are highly domain specific (i.e. offer state management for a very specific set of things in a very specific context). Cloudomation is the only framework that allows you to model your own custom entities for which you want to manage state, and to define in Python how state changes are done. This is invaluable when you want to sustainably manage complex infrastructure across different clouds and tech stacks.
  • Unrivalled stability and scalability due to savepoints: How Python is executed on Cloudomation is different from how it runs elsewhere. We persist the execution stack of your scripts with every call of our Python API. This means script executions can be interrupted and resumed easily. This makes it robust, and easily scalable.
  • Cloudomation AI assistant: While lots of AI assistants offer code completion or can help with questions about Python, our built-in Cloudomation assistant knows Cloudomation specific functionality and has tools that allow it to directly create resources and write code in Cloudomation. Even though Cloudomation is a powerful and complex tool, using it becomes easy with the Cloudomation AI assistant.
• Services & support: Vendor support is a classic advantage of commercial versus open source software.

Yes. Cloudomation is best used as the backend for your developer portal. We recommend using specialised portal software like Backstage, Port, or others, as a GUI for your developers.

Yes, Cloudomation is only available for companies and not for private individuals.

Take a look at our pricing page.

You can try Cloudomation in a deferred-payment setting: You get a license for free to trial for up to six weeks, as well as three days of consulting to get you started. If you don’t like it, you pay nothing. If you choose to proceed with us, we invoice you for the consulting time when you buy your license. Get in touch if you’re interested in a trial.

We currently don’t offer free trials with self sign-up. 
If you are looking for a different trial or PoC setup, we’re always happy to talk. Book a 15 minute chat, tell us what you are looking for, and we will see how we can accommodate you.