Alation Cloud and On-Premise

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

When you purchase the Alation software, you have the choice between hosting Alation on-premise or in the cloud using Alation Cloud Service. If you use Alation Cloud Service, your Alation instance resides on Alation’s servers and runs on a scalable architecture. Your instance will be fully administered, maintained, and upgraded by Alation. If you install Alation on-premise, you procure and host your own physical infrastructure, install the software, and perform administration and maintenance yourself.

Alation Cloud Service offers a faster time to value as software upgrades and patches are handled by Alation and issued as soon as they’re available. In addition, Alation handles all maintenance, backups, and disaster recovery so you have little administrative overhead.

There is no difference for end users between Alation hosted in the cloud versus on-premise. Both hosting methods provide Alation’s full functionality, and Alation’s version numbering is the same in both cases.

For administrators, both on-premise and cloud instances of Alation have an Admin Settings control panel where administrators can perform actions like:

  • Manage users

  • Enable and disable certain features

  • Customize the catalog’s appearance

  • Monitor system health and activity

  • Configure settings for authentication, email, and more

System administrators for on-premise instances of Alation can use the Installation & Configuration and Alation for Server Administrators sections of the documentation for help installing and administering Alation. Many of the procedures in these sections assume you have access to the machine where Alation is installed so you can interact with the Alation backend using the command line.

System administrators for Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation can rely on Alation’s Support and Site Reliability Engineers to perform any necessary backend tasks that require access to the Alation machine. See the Alation Cloud Service section of the documentation for more details about availability, security, and configuration for Alation in the cloud.