Engine Only – Build Your Own Apps & Services

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Problem

Complex deployment process that is difficult to automate: many components with different configuration have to be deployed to different target environments such as staging, test and production environments. High effort for manual deployments.

Solution

Visual modelling of software creates one place to keep an overview over deployments. Model is used as basis for end-to-end automation in Python automation engine. Modular automation makes changes to the deployment automation a breeze. 

❌ Without Cloudomation Engine

From a Lot of Scripts

Platform Engineers have to provide services to many stakeholders. Building an internal developer platform (IDP) is part of their work, but often doesn’t cover all requirements. This leads to duplication of effort when engineers provide services via a platform, and via other channels, and/or leads to manually scripted services being built next to the platform, which is costly and unsustainable.

✅ With Cloudomation Engine

To a Unified Platform that Reduces Operational Friction

As a pure Python end-to-end automation framework, Engine can flexibly be used to provide services via a platform or portal, or outside of it. The same workflows can be exposed via a portal, or via custom, single web-apps with custom configuration options, tailored to specific stakeholders. IDP-independent services can be built and provided via Engine, and monitored and managed in the same interface as IDP-backend services.

How It Works

Build

Use Engine’s pure Python object oriented automation framework to build the services you need, or to orchestrate and extend existing services. With a native configuration management system, orchestrating existing infrastructure automation pipelines becomes a breeze, and makes it possible to limit the configuration options available to different user groups to reduce complexity and sources of error. 

Provide

Provide services via single-form web apps to stakeholders, or via custom webhook-based APIs, where they can be triggered from other applications or embedded in portals or other UIs. You can provide services via an email  inbox, or as a MS Teams app, or via any other interface that your stakeholders already know and use – Engine works in the background.

Monitor and Manage

Keep an overview of all workflows, webhooks, web apps and infrastructure provisioned via Engine. Engine’s custom objects allow you to create objects in the platform that tie together all information about your automation targets and makes it simple and easy to see and understand what is happening. 

Outcome

Unified Framework

Platform engineers, DevOps engineers, operations engineers and SREs have one unified framework that empowers them to build services quickly, expose them flexibly in ways that are simple to use, and to manage them sustainably. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Can Engine be used without an IDP or portal?

Yes. Engine is an automation framework that can be used on its own to automate a wide range of workflows, independently of any portal or developer platform. Many of our customers use Engine for use cases unrelated to software engineering, such as ETL, business application integration, automating payroll and other weird and wonderful use cases. Many of our customers use Engine in their software engineering or operations teams, but do not have an IDP. They use Engine for release automation, build and deployment automation, for their CI/CD pipelines, and other operations / DevOps tasks, but without a portal or IDP. 

What is object oriented automation?
Object-oriented automation is centered around objects, which have attributes and a lifecycle. You model your objects in Engine’s configuration management component. This means creating and object and adding attributes to it in a matter of minutes. The object has lifecycle hooks: before-create, on-create, on-update and on-delete. You write Python scripts which you then assign to these lifecycle hooks. When an object is created, updated or deleted, the lifecycle hooks are called, the Python scripts you define run, and get the entire object and its attributes as input. You can use this in the Python script to determine what should happen.
 
It is not compulsory to use objects in Engine – you can also just script away in Python. However we found that it is a lot more sustainable, easier to keep an overview and to manage workflows if they are centered around objects, which serve as one single place that tie together all information about this object.
 
Objects can be anything that is part of your workflow: a server, a cloud development environment, a version of your software etc. Anything that you want to be configurable, and that you want to use in your workflows.
Read more about object oriented automation in our blog.
Can I build mobile apps with Cloudomation Engine?

When we say “app”, we generally mean web-app. Engine is not a platform for building mobile apps, though web-apps can also be accessed via a browser from a mobile device.

Engine can however be used to deploy environments and tools for mobile app development, and as a backend for an internal development platform for mobile development. 

Meet Your New Platfrom Engineering Tool

Streamline operations, optimize collaboration, and deliver faster. Let’s discuss how our platform can help you overcome challenges and hit your goals.

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