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.

As your team reaches milestones within your development lifecycle, the CTO.ai platform collects these Lifeycle Events to derive Insights about the effectiveness of your software delivery processes—helping you identify points of friction that inevitably emerge as any organization evolves.

What is a Developer Control Plane?

Our Developer Control Plane connects the applications and workflows your team uses to manage the cloud infrastructure running your mission-critical applications.

While we offer a number of open-source Workflows.sh Stacks 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.

Our DCP is a flexible, composable framework you can use to shape an application platform that meets the needs of your organization as it grows and evolves.

Does this replace my existing tools?

Only if you want to replace your existing tools! Our DCP offers many of the same features found in traditional CI/CD services, application platforms, and infrastructure management tools—but we also provide the flexibility to integrate with the tools you already use.

We’re focused on improving the ease of use and measurability of your development workflows by building a tool that fits into your existing playbook with as little friction as possible. When you make full use of the features we offer, you can provide your team with a single touchpoint for managing all of the mission-critical workflows needed to meet the needs of your organization.

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).

Is CTO.ai a workflow automation platform?

Yes! Commands are your team’s entrypoint to interactively managing your cloud infrastructure from the command-line interface—or Slack! Our platform acts as the interface between you and the Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools that orchestrate your cloud environment, enabling your team to manage complex multi-step migrations, operate standardized playbooks for incident management, or simply automate the routine tasks that keep your applications running smoothly—all from the interfaces you’re familiar with.

Is CTO.ai a CI/CD platform?

Yes! Pipelines allow you to bootstrap and deploy the CI/CD workflows that are the foundation of your development lifecycle. As with any CI/CD provider, Pipelines allow you to define sequences of steps that turn your codebase into an executable artifact, orchestrate changes to your infrastructure, and deploy your application to production.

As you might expect, our Pipelines can be triggered by activity in your Git repository (e.g. a new pull request), allowing you to build and publish container images for deployment to your cloud provider of choice.

Is CTO.ai a development tool?

Yes! Services offer a way to deploy independent, long-running applications accessible at a uniquely-generated URL (or via a custom domain). Whether you need a way to easily deploy applications to a lightweight container environment for sharing and feedback, or you just want a quick way to serve an internal tool to your team, Services can be your deployment target.

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

Our goal is to provide composable building blocks you can use to build an application platform that is tightly coupled to your organization’s needs, but flexible enough to grow as your processes mature. 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! Commands, Pipelines, and Services allow you to integrate your existing tooling seamlessly with the CTO.ai platform and act as the interface between you and your infrastructure. Workflows are specified in an ops.yml configuration file, which defines the steps your workflow is meant to automate and the events that should trigger it.

Workflow containers using our base images 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! The lifecycle events collected from your development tools can be used to derive Insights about the effectiveness of your software delivery processes. These DORA Metrics measure your team’s performance as your infrastructure needs change and your processes evolve, allowing you to identify points of friction as they emerge.