App Deployment Simplified
GitOps without the hassle.
Securely deploy internal tools for teams.
What is Clace?
Clace™ is an application server for teams to deploy internal tools. Clace provides declarative GitOps based blue-green deployment, OAuth access controls, TLS certs & secrets management etc.
Some of the unique features of Clace are:
➣ Staged deployment, for code and config changes
➣ Atomic updates for multiple apps, all or nothing
➣ Declarative config sync with automated reconciliation
First AppServer for Containerized apps
Clace is the first AppServer built to manage containerized webapps. Clace supports:
➣ Deploy webapps developed in any language/framework
➣ Handle request routing, domain based or path based
➣ Manage app lifecycle imperatively (using CLI) or declaratively (through GitOps)
How is Clace implemented
Clace is cross-platform, built as a single binary which implements the webserver and AppServer. Clace uses:
➣ Declarative config using Starlark (python-like)
➣ SQLite database for metadata persistence (allowing for transactional updates)
➣ CLI which uses a unix domain socket for security
➣ GitOps driven declarative interface which works with any hosted Git service
Container management
Build and deploy containerized web apps, with Docker or Podman.
GitOps Workflow
Blue-green (staged) deployments, versioning and preview environments with no infra to manage.
Automatic GitOps Sync
Easily setup scheduled Git sync with pull based updates
Scale down to zero
Apps are initialized lazily, on demand: scale down to zero automatically.
Autogenerated web-apps
Auto generate simple web interfaces for existing CLI tools and API endpoints.
Cross-platform
Clace runs natively on Linux, Windows and OSX; use for app dev and then for app hosting
Comparison with other solutions
Compared to solutions like Coolify, Dokku etc, Clace supports:
➣ Declarative GitOps interface, for code and for config
➣ OAuth and auditing features required by teams
➣ Deploying custom apps as against deploying pre-packaged services
Compared to heavyweight solutions built on K8s, Clace provides:
➣ Single service as against glueing together CI/CD with ArgoCD/FluxCD and IDPs
➣ Easy OAuth config for app access controls
➣ Simple declarative config for container and web server. No YAML files, no webserver DSLs.
Built for deploying internal tools
Clace is built for teams to be able to securely develop and deploy internal tools:
➣ Multiple apps can be updated atomically (all-or-nothing), no broken state after deployment failures.
➣ Built for the full application management lifecycle across a team, not just the initial installation.
➣ Security sand-boxing features which allow operations teams to easily manage applications through GitOps while allowing development teams to freely make code changes.
Clace apps can be:
➣ Containerized apps deployed from source
➣ Autogenerated form interface for backend Actions
➣ Hypermedia based apps served by Clace
Common use cases
Clace can be used by teams to:
➣ Deploy web apps built with Streamlit/Gradio/FastHTML/NiceGUI etc
➣ Zero config required for most common frameworks, just specify the spec to use
➣ Automate internal operations using Action Jobs, replacing Jenkins and Rundeck
➣ Expose web apps for internal REST APIs, replacing curl and Postman
The auth and auditing features of Clace are built for use by teams. Clace can also be used by individuals:
➣ To easily run web apps in development mode locally, without having to set up a dev environment
➣ To host web apps exposed publicly, with OAuth enabled or otherwise
