Lately everywhere I look people are throwing this term around left and right but I don’t actually get what Amazon Web Services is, how it’s used, what it’s used for, or why it’s helpful. Someone please help lol

Hello!

I want to upgrade my business and I found a service that I have to connect my "aws access key" and my "aws secret access key" to connect something from AWS to the service I want to use.

From what I can understand, I need an AWS server and I can find these keys through the platform (which is very complicated not gonna lie) and then the application will run on my servers? If so, do specs matter? It's just basic browser tasks so I don't need much stuff. If you wanted to have a few servers with browser tasks what specs would you go for? I suppose we don't need a GPU? Thank you!

Hi, I'm Alon, and I'm building Alien, an open-source platform for deploying your software into your customer's AWS account, and keeping it fully managed.

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 in my own cloud account?"

Every founder I talk to who's building an AI or security product 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 with: 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!