Platform Overview

Getting Started with CTO.ai

The CTO.ai platform provides your team with a Developer Control Plane (DCP), allowing you to deploy your applications on any cloud provider, interact with your infrastructure, and automate your development workflows. When our Developer Control Plane is used to manage your cloud infrastructure and integrate other tools in your workflow, you can measure the effectiveness of your development processes as they evolve alongside the changing needs of your organization.

What is a Developer Control Plane?

We define a Developer Control Plane as a tool for managing the tools and workflows your team needs to deploy software and manage infrastructure; a platform management tool for managing your own platform.

CTO.ai provides you with flexible, composable building blocks that you can use to build an application deployment platform that’s unique to your team and accounts for the nuances of how your organization operates. While we offer a number of pre-built Developer Experience frameworks that you can customize to your application requirements, we aren’t trying to lock you into a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, we give you the tools needed to build the platform you want.

What tools can I integrate?

Among our currently supported integrations are source control providers (e.g. GitHub), Infrastructure-as-Code providers (e.g. Terraform Cloud, CloudFormation), and cloud infrastructure providers (e.g. DigitalOcean, AWS). Our goal is to provide your team with a single point of access for all of the tools you need to build effective DevOps workflows.

Does this replace my existing tools?

Only if you want to replace your existing tools!

Our platform offers many of the features you might find in traditional CI/CD services, application platforms, or infrastructure management tools, but we also support integrations with many of those very same tools. We’re focused on improving the ease of use and measurability of your development workflows, and we believe the most effective way to do that is by building a tool that fits into your existing workflows with as little friction as possible.

When you make full use of the features we offer, you can provide your team with a single point to interact with all of the mission-critical workflows they need to meet the needs of your organization.

Is CTO.ai a workflow automation platform?

Yes! We offer Commands workflows that allow your team to manage your cloud infrastructure interactively from the command line or Slack. You can run Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) workflows using third-party cloud orchestration systems, manage complex multi-step migrations, or provide standardized playbooks for incident management—all from the interfaces you’re familiar with.

Is CTO.ai a CI/CD platform?

Yes! We offer Pipelines workflows that allow you to define sequences of steps to execute when triggered by events in your source control workflow—or any other event source you might build.

Pipelines generally address the same needs that are met by a traditional CI/CD provider: triggering workflows with activity in your Git repository, building and publishing container images to a registry, or orchestrating changes to your infrastructure. If you opt to integrate our Pipelines into your development workflow, you’ll benefit from having a CI/CD workflow that tightly integrates with our Commands and Services workflows.

Is CTO.ai a Platform-as-a-Service?

Yes! We offer Services workflows that allow you to deploy independent, long-running applications that can be accessed over the public internet at a uniquely-generated URL. These Services can also be served via a custom domain name or from behind a load balancer. Services make it easy to deploy applications to a lightweight container environment for sharing and feedback.

Beyond that, our fundamental goal is to provide composable building blocks you can use to build your own application platform that is tightly coupled with your organization’s needs. We provide reusable deployment stacks, built by our engineers and community, that you can use as the starting point for deploying your own application to the cloud infrastructure of your choice.

Is CTO.ai a DevOps platform?

Yes! Our Commands, Pipelines, and Services workflows allow you to integrate your existing tooling seamlessly with the CTO.ai platform and act as the interface between you and your infrastructure. Each type of workflow is defined in an ops.yml configuration file, which specifies how your code is containerized to run in our Kubernetes environment, how your workflows are triggered, and how they integrate with each other.

All workflow containers have access to our SDK, allowing your code to interact with your team’s Configs and Secrets Stores, record logs, and respond to Events in your development lifecycle. This gives you everything you need to build your own cloud orchestration platform without having to manage even more infrastructure.

Is CTO.ai a process measurement platform?

Yes! As you use the development tools you connect to the CTO.ai platform, we collect Events representing milestones in your development lifecycle and derive Insights about the effectiveness of your processes. CTO.ai Insights uses DORA Metrics to measure your team’s performance as your infrastructure needs change and your processes evolve.