Alto was designed to be extraordinarily lightweight — that way, users can focus on writing their core code rather than fiddling with their cloud environments. One of the main concepts in Alto is agents. Agents are custom runtime environments in the cloud. The configuration for agents is defined in a YAML file, and it’s designed to be (mostly) cloud-agnostic. That is, the configuration file shouldn’t change dramatically whether you’re running your code on an EC2 instance, a EMR cluster, or a GCP virtual machine.
Agents are currently configured using YAML. In the future, users will be able to express agent and image configurations entirely in code.
Alto currently supports the following agents: We’re just getting started, so please let us know if you use a cloud environment that isn’t current supported!