In my previous startup, I heard the same question from every single enterprise customer over and over again: "My data is sensitive. Can I deploy your product to my own cloud account?"
Every founder I talk to who's building anything in AI or security hits the same wall.
To solve this, many teams create a self-hosted version of their product. They send a Docker image or an Helm chart to the customer and let them install the entire product on their side.
While self-hosting is great (and will continue to be important!), it has 2 problems:
1. Enterprise customers are forced to operate third-party software and own deployments, upgrades, and security risks. In most cases they don't want that. They prefer a managed experience, with no data leaving their environment. 2. Even with self-hosting, vendors are still accountable when things break, but they have little to no visibility. When something breaks - and it always does - you're on a 2am Zoom call screen share debugging blind because you have no access. No auto-updates, no logs, every customer is on a different version.
That's why many successful SaaS companies that deal with sensitive data like Databricks, Wiz, and others spent years building internal infrastructure to automatically deploy, update, and monitor their software across AWS, GCP, and Azure. It's a win-win: no sensitive data leaves the customer’s environment, and the software is still fully managed by the vendor.
Alien manages deployments across every customer's cloud through cloud APIs — no network connection to their environment needed. The mental model is like sharing a Google Drive folder: the customer grants least-privilege IAM access to an isolated area in their cloud, you manage what's inside, they can revoke it anytime.
The whole thing is written in Rust and works across AWS, GCP, Azure, and locally from a single codebase. You can get started here: https://alien.dev/docs/quickstart
Here's how it works: https://alien.dev/docs/how-alien-works GitHub: https://github.com/alienplatform/alien
Excited to share Alien with everyone here – let me know what you think!
No comments yet.
