What is Attini?
Attini is a serverless deployment framework for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) designed for Cloud Engineers by Cloud Engineers. Attini aims to improve the way of working with AWS CloudFormation.
An IT resource is always dependent on its contexts, such as its surrounding resources or deployment order. Attini respects this and includes the context in its artifacts.
Attini doesn't require a central CI/CD platform. Instead, it can extend your existing tools or be used directly without affecting your existing workflows.
Attini is designed for hands-off deployment with reproducible results, ensuring that your resources look and behave the same in all your different IT environments.
Who should use Attini?
Attini is perfect for any company running on AWS and are maintaining multiple IT environments. Attini is particularly good at managing AWS CloudFormation and integrating with other AWS Services.
Vision
Attini is designed by DevOps engineers that want to automate their own work. We see a troublesome consequence of constantly evolving cloud environments that organizations use for their applications. The fast evolution of cloud services solves many problems. However, it also increases complexity. The industry's response to this complexity are new CI/CD tools like "Infrastructure as Code (IaC)" and their abstractions "Cloud Development Kits (CDK)".
So now, organizations use increasingly complex technologies to manage increasingly complex IT environments. To make matters worse, IaC is often combined with other management tools like configuration software (Ansible, Chef, etc.), serverless functions, build servers, and more. Together these factors make the DevOps engineers work increasingly difficult.
This trend often results in complex manual maintenance, tightly coupled deployment processes, and complicated documentation. Attini wants to build a hands-off deployment framework that structures your whole workflow. The framework will make it easy to reproduce any deployment, find drifts, compare IT environments and automate any operational task.
We at Attini want cloud environments to be easy to work with and quickly understood! We want to eliminate complex and repetitive manual work and make project handovers smooth and predictable.
Get in touch
Send us an email at contact@attini.io
FAQ
How does it work?
All programmatic management systems* require the same 4 things:
1. Code (templates, playbooks etc)
2. Configuration
3. Binary (A computer or a build server with the tools installed)
4. Access (Permissions to perform the updates needed)
The Attini framework allows you to package your code and configuration together with an Attini deployment plan that can do any routine task. When a package (Attini distribution) gets deployed to an environment the Attini framework will automatically unpack your files (Code and configuration) and run the Attini deployment plan. The Attini deployment plan can then run any container or AWS lambdas for your binaries and give it any IAM roles required. It can orchestrate complex deployment flows with choices, parallel executions, retries and more.
*Technologies like AWS CloudFormation, Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Pulumi etc.
How is an Attini distribution different from a container/docker image?
Containers allow developers to package their code in combination with an operating system and other software so that their applications can be run in a predictable and standardized way. The Attini framework is based on the same design principles but it's not made for application code. It is designed for DevOps engineers to be able package technologies like AWS CloudFormation, AWS CDK, Terraform, Ansible and all other IT management tools in a format that can be automatically deployed.
How is the Attini Framework different from Kubernetes and Amazon ECS?
Kubernetes and Amazon ECS are systems for container orchestration. It essentially runs your containerized workloads for you. This is a difficult technical challenge and Attini will not replace these systems.
The Attini framework is focused on the cloud environment, meaning that it will set up cloud resources like networks, databases, autoscaling groups, loadbalancers, certificates, IAM roles, encryptions keys etc. that your containerized workloads need.
The Attini framework can run containers with kubectl and with the AWS CLI installed on it so that an Attini deployment plan can be used to integrate with these container orchestration tools.
How is this different from Infrastructure as Code?
Attini is an orchestration tool, so it can configure and maintain IT environments that are built with Infrastructure as Code tools. So Attini is used for configuring and deploying AWS CloudFormation or Terraform, not to replace it.
Which technologies does Attini work with?
At the moment the Attini framework only works on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Initially we will only have native support for AWS CloudFormation, but the Attini deployment plan is built on AWS Stepfunctions which integrates nicely with container services like AWS CodeBuild, ECS Fargate and AWS Lambda which can run any technology or API calls you need (ex Terraform, Ansible, Kubectl etc).
The Attini framework will automatically trigger containers via the Attini deployment plan and make sure your code and config are available to those containers.
We plan to build standardized ways to configure and deploy common technologies like AWS CDK, AWS SAM, Terraform, Pulumi and Ansible in the future. We also plan to build support for other popular clouds like GCP and Azure.
If you have any feature requests or feedback, please get in touch with us via contact@attini.io and we will prioritize our backlog after our customers vote.
Does Attini support SSO?
Attini only uses AWS resources inside of your AWS account which is accessed using your AWS CLI credentials.
So if your organization already have SSO set up for the AWS CLI, you are already done with your SSO configuration.
This also means that AWS CloudTrail will log everything that the Attini CLI does on your behalf.
How do I get started?
To quickly test the framework you can follow our quick start guide.
For a more production ready setup please see our CLI installation guide and our Attini setup guide.
Pricing and Support
Pricing
Support
Attini Product Comparison
One of Attini's biggest technical differentiator is the underlying technology. Attini is built on AWS StepFunctions and other well suited serverless services which enable us to be event driven and integrate with all AWS Services.
This makes Attini much faster and more flexible than other technologies.
Attini is a part of the AWS Partner Network (APN).
Attini is a proud member of Sting, which is the leading ecosystem in the Nordics for startups with high growth potential.
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