Humanitec

Humanitec is a platform orchestrator designed to help platform engineering teams build powerful internal developer platforms (IDPs) that provide developers with self-service infrastructure capabilities. By abstracting cloud infrastructure complexity and standardizing how applications connect to their resources, Humanitec enables platform teams to define golden paths that developers can follow without deep infrastructure expertise.

The core concept in Humanitec is the separation of concerns between application developers and platform engineers. Developers describe what their application needs, such as a database, a message queue, or a cache, without specifying how these resources should be provisioned or configured. Platform engineers define the rules for how these resource requests are fulfilled, including which cloud services to use, how they are configured, and how connection credentials are managed. Humanitec handles the dynamic matching of requests to resources and the injection of the appropriate configuration at deployment time.

The Resource Graph is the mechanism through which Humanitec implements this separation. Platform engineers define resource definitions that describe how each type of resource (PostgreSQL databases, Redis caches, S3 buckets, Kubernetes namespaces, etc.) is provisioned and configured for each environment or deployment context. When a workload is deployed, Humanitec resolves the resource graph, provisions or reuses the appropriate resources, and injects the connection details as environment variables or configuration files automatically.

Score is an open source workload specification format developed by Humanitec that provides a developer-centric way to describe application workload requirements, including services, ports, environment variables, and resource dependencies, without specifying any cloud technology. Score files can be translated to Kubernetes manifests, Docker Compose configurations, or Humanitec platform specifications, enabling portability across different deployment targets.

The deployment pipeline in Humanitec supports image-driven deployments where developers or CI systems trigger deployments by providing a new container image reference. Humanitec handles the rest, rendering the Kubernetes manifests with the correct environment-specific configuration, applying them to the target cluster, and tracking the deployment status. Deployment history, diff views, and rollback capabilities provide visibility and control over the deployment process.

Environment management in Humanitec is dynamic and scalable. Environments can be created on demand for feature branches, testing requirements, and customer demos, and each environment automatically receives its own set of appropriately configured resources. The ephemeral environment capability enables teams to create and destroy environments quickly without manual infrastructure work.

The Humanitec platform integrates with major CI/CD tools including GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, and Jenkins for triggering deployments, with Kubernetes clusters across all major cloud providers, and with infrastructure provisioning tools like Terraform and Crossplane for resource provisioning.