When we founded Humanitec in 2018 the world of software engineering looked quite different. Kubernetes was in its infancy, AI was a thing of the future. But what didn’t change was our conviction that graph-based Orchestrators and not CI/CD pipelines are the way to manage complex infrastructure estates. Whether consumed by humans - or AI agents.
A Platform Orchestrator allows humans and AI agents to provision, manage and secure infrastructure, policies, and developer workflows. Platform teams define standards once; the Orchestrator enforces them everywhere, keeping a graph record of all infrastructure and relationships between them. Developers and AI agents get simple, secure self-service.
Over the last 7 years, we’ve seen our Platform Orchestrator rolled out from San Francisco to Mongolia and from Norway to Australia, powering governments, enterprises and startups. Helping keep infrastructure configurations clean, easy to maintain, secure and enabling self-service for developers. Following our mantra “serving platform engineers” we’ve seen fantastic platforms built with Humanitec as the backend.
And with all this knowledge, we are now beyond proud to present to you our all new Platform Orchestrator. Designed to work with any compute, in any cloud environment (even your private cloud!). Designed for the age of AI. Designed for rapid onboarding and with a radically simplified conceptual model.
We’ve listened - here’s what’s different
#1: any compute, any infrastructure
The first version of our Platform Orchestrator was 100% focused on the Kubernetes ecosystem. If you were using serverless or VMs we couldn’t serve you. While this worked for “pure” Kubernetes estate, most of you have a mix of compute and resources.
The new Orchestrator is redesigned from the ground up to work with any compute and any resource in any cloud and on-prem. Your VM estate on your private data centre? No problem. Your serverless functions? Easy! This allows you to introduce one central infrastructure management paradigm - for everything.
We’re aware that we are taking a very different route than the Orchestration products that tie themselves completely to Kubernetes. But we’ve come to the fundamental conclusion that while you can forcefully imitate any resource as a Kubernetes object this isn’t a clean architectural design in most enterprise realities.
#2: non-intrusive and brownfield compatible
The previous Orchestrator was non-trivial to introduce when you already had a large brownfield estate. Just doing an MVP took weeks. For the relaunch, we’ve radically simplified this. MVPs shouldn’t take more than two days, implementations in brownfield setups are non-intrusive and easy. It works with your existing IaC estate and lets you keep your deployment pipelines and flows as they are.
#3: easy to understand
While the first version was incredibly flexible and allowed you to “somehow do everything” but the amount of concepts you needed to learn to truly master it was draining on platform engineers. The new Orchestrator is different. The conceptual model is closely aligned with the IaC ecosystem. We’re not introducing new concepts: anyone familiar with Terraform can get set up in minutes.
#4: AI-first
The longer we observed the AI trend, the clearer it became that AI agents need to have a deterministic backend that makes sure infrastructure is spun up and managed in a policy-compliant manner. We experimented up and down with MCP servers, etc., and found that the actual trick is to build the product and documentation in a way coding agents easily understand and use instantaneously. Spin up Claude Code and make it use Humanitec - it’s a breeze!Â
#5: interface-agnostic
We have always believed that platforms need to meet the user where they are. So developers can use it to self-service anything from their IDE, CLI, any portal, coding agent or API.
So now?
So now, if you are into infrastructure and platform engineering, you should go test it. The free version on the website is stripped down to give you an idea of the concepts. If you are in need of enterprise functionality, reach out. You can sign up here and go through this tutorial. We’ll also do a webinar explaining and demoing everything that’s new, you can sign up here. If you’re an existing customer of Humanitec you’re good, we’ll continue to support the previous version!Â
We’re so excited to hear what you think!
