Operate Existing Environments
Attach Alien to BYOC deployments you already ship.
Alien Operate is for teams that already deploy into customer clouds with Terraform, Pulumi, Helm, or raw manifests.
Instead of replacing that setup, Alien attaches an Operator or read-only cloud inventory role and gives you fleet visibility: what exists, which version is running, whether it is healthy, and when it last checked in.
Operate deployments are observe-only. Alien does not deploy a release, reconcile alien.ts, restart workloads, patch manifests, or delete resources.
Inventory
How Alien discovers and displays existing cloud and Kubernetes resources.
Permissions
Read-only access required for observe-only setup.
How It Works
- Create an Operate setup link for a customer environment.
- The customer installs the Operator in Kubernetes, or grants read-only cloud inventory access for AWS, GCP, or Azure.
- Alien creates an observe-only deployment with no desired release.
- Inventory and heartbeats flow back to your dashboard.
The customer's existing deployment pipeline remains the owner of application lifecycle. Alien observes it.
Build vs Operate
| Build | Operate | |
|---|---|---|
| App definition | alien.ts | Existing Terraform, Pulumi, Helm, or YAML |
| Who deploys | Alien | Customer's existing pipeline |
| What Alien changes | Live resources from your stack | Nothing in v1 |
| What Alien reports | Releases, telemetry, commands, resource health | Inventory, connectivity, resource health |
You can start with Operate for visibility and move selected workloads to Build later.