Introducing Altostra for Engineering Teams
Whether you are two developers working in the garage or a team of dozens in a large organization, you can now collaborate your work and manage multiple teams at once.
Originally published on Altostra.
Until today, Altostra was focused on single developers, offering a free plan for individual developers to create cloud-native applications in a no-code environment.
As customers scaled to the point where collaboration became critical, we have started to get requests for collaboration abilities within Altostra. We heard you, and after a successful period among our design partners, we are happy to announce the general availability of the Team plan. You can now create teams, invite members and share projects and environments with your teammates.
Developer vs. Team
As a developer-first company, we saw the significance of having a free-forever Developer plan for individual developers. As such, you can enjoy Altostra in multiple verticals for hobby, learning and after-hours projects. Think about it like a GitHub personal account vs. an Organization account, where organization == team.
On the other hand, a team in Altostra is a shared account with its own configuration, 3rd party integrations, projects, environments, and permissions.
Access Control
When you create a team, you become the team owner with full access to manage it as you wish. You can then invite other members to join your team as admins — the significant difference is that only the owner can control the team’s billing settings and delete the team.
Other, more granular roles are currently available in private preview, for example:
- Viewer — suitable for users who shouldn’t make any changes yet can get a system view.
- Deployer — ideal for users who can create projects and deploy new instances.
- Approver — meant for key roles on the team who can approve changes before they are deployed, such as team leads, architects and CISO.
Contact us if you need one or more of these roles for your team.
3rd Party Integrations
To get started with Altostra, you first need to connect your Git account so we can create and update your project repositories. For the complete development experience with Altostra, you need to connect your cloud account and then we can automate the deployment process for you.
Our Developer plan supports a single account for each, one Git provider and one cloud services provider, that usually meets all the single developer needs. For teams, though, it varies a lot. Therefore our Team plan supports multiple accounts for both Git and cloud providers. Also, integrating with 3rd party cloud services, like logging, for example, is independent for each account.
Team Dashboard
Collaborating on shared resources is not a simple task in general and especially in today’s reality when most companies are working from home until further notice. With Altostra’s Activity Log, every team can stay up-to-date and get a clear view of its remote members’ activities, such as deployments, deletions and validations.
Upgrade to Team
To create a team, go to the top-left menu in the main navigation bar and click “Create a team”. You can invite your team members right away or do it later from the team members page.
Joining a team is as simple as creating it — just click the link in the invitation email.
Use the team members page to manage your team, invite new members, resend invitations, leave a team, or remove members.
Going Forward
As your organization grows, you can create more teams to accommodate the separation of resources and control to make it easier for your developers to collaborate.
That’s just the beginning. Stay tuned as we bring more capabilities to engineering teams across different industries.
We want to hear from you. Share your Altostra experience with us and any suggestions that can make your work with Altostra even better.
Contact us at support@altostra.com.