Architect Composer Utility (ACU)

Write once, deploy everywhere. ACU is a provider-agnostic infrastructure composition tool that lets you define enterprise-grade deployments once and run them across any environment—local, staging, or production.

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Features
• Installation
• Quick Start
• How It Works
• Usage Examples
• Contributing
• License

Overview

ACU simplifies infrastructure orchestration by decoupling infrastructure definitions from provider implementations. Define your infrastructure topology in a single infra.yml file—including databases, clusters, message queues, and more—without committing to a specific provider, version, or SQL/NoSQL flavor. When it's time to deploy, choose your provider and let ACU handle the translation.

Philosophy

• Provider Agnostic: Define resources once; deploy to any provider (AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Docker, bare metal).
• Developer-Friendly: Simple YAML syntax makes it easy for developers to spin up local infrastructure environments.
• Production Ready: Scale from local development to enterprise deployments without rewriting configs.

Features

✅ Provider-Agnostic Infrastructure Definitions — Define databases, clusters, queues, and services without provider lock-in.

✅ Multi-Cloud & Multi-Environment Support — Deploy the same infrastructure template to Kubernetes, Docker, VMs, and bare metal.

✅ Local-to-Production Parity — Simulate enterprise-grade infrastructure locally; deploy to production with the same definitions.

✅ Cross-Platform CLI — Available on Linux, macOS, and Windows via uvx.

✅ Fast, Rust-Powered — Built with Rust for speed and reliability.

Installation

Using uvx (Recommended)

uvx acu

Using uv Tool Manager

uv tool install acu
acu --version

From Source

git clone https://github.com/carlosferreyra/acu
cd acu
uv build

Quick Start

1. Create Your Infrastructure Definition

Initialize a new infra.yml file (like Dockerfile for Docker):

acu new

This creates a minimal or templated infra.yml in your current directory.

2. Define Your Infrastructure

Edit infra.yml to describe your infrastructure. See the full example at docs/infra.example.yml for a validated, provider-agnostic template with resources, connections, labels, and scopes.

3. Deploy

Run commands from the directory containing infra.yml (no need to specify file path):

# Spin up infrastructure locally for development/testing
acu run dev

# Validate infrastructure definition
acu validate

# Deploy to production with environment-specific settings
acu deploy

# Dry-run (simulate without deploying)
acu deploy --dry-run

How It Works

1. Define infrastructure in a provider-agnostic YAML format (infra.yml).
2. Validate your definitions for correctness.
3. Simulate locally to test topology and dependencies.
4. Deploy to your chosen provider (Docker, Kubernetes, cloud, etc.) without changing the definition.

Resource type defaults and allowed fields: see docs/resource-types.md.

The key insight: infrastructure definitions describe what you need, not how to provision it. ACU translates your definitions into provider-specific configurations at deployment time.

Usage Examples

Example 1: Local Development Environment

Spun up a multi-service stack locally for testing:

# Create infra.yml
acu new --template multi-service

# Run everything locally with Docker
acu run dev

This starts databases, clusters, and queues locally using Docker, perfect for development.

Example 2: Production Deployment

Deploy the same infrastructure to production:

# Deploy to Kubernetes, cloud providers, or bare metal
acu deploy

This uses the production settings defined in infra.yml to provision real infrastructure.

Example 3: Multi-Provider Deployment

acu deploy --providers docker,kubernetes,aws

Or configure all providers in infra.yml and deploy to all with:

acu deploy --all-providers

This translates your single infrastructure definition into Docker Compose, Kubernetes manifests, and AWS CloudFormation—all without touching the original definition.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! ACU is in active development, and we're looking for:

• Provider implementations (Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, CloudFormation, etc.)
• Infrastructure resource types (networks, storage, monitoring, etc.)
• Documentation and examples
• Bug reports and feature requests

See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

License

ACU is dual-licensed under the MIT License and other permissive licenses for compatibility with projects like Ruff and uv.

See LICENSE for details.