DevOps tool vendor Atlassian wants to get customers started on writing apps that integrate with its own product portfolio, introducing them to a beta version of Forge, a new cloud development platform.

The new product is meant to facilitate the building and running of enterprise-grade apps in the Atlassian cloud and help tackle security concerns amongst other things. While its creators acknowledge that it won’t be an option for all use cases, remote-hosted apps being one, it intends to lower the barrier for developers without in-depth expertise of cloud architecture.

Forge is made up of a serverless function-as-a-service platform, a declarative UI language, and a “DevOps toolchain” which can be used through the project’s own command line interface. The former is powered by AWS Lambda and, amongst other things, supposedly improves security and privacy by running apps inside a second security layer which “enforces tenancy isolation and data egress restriction by design”.

The Forge UI was added to the package to ensure developers can create user experiences that are consistent across devices – and somewhat compatible with the Atlassian UX. It also abstracts away the process of rendering the UI layer, which the company says will provide “stronger guarantees about how apps present or transmit sensitive data”.

Users will be able to manage their app’s lifecycle through a CLI, that under the hood makes use of products such as Bitbucket Pipelines. To get started, Atlassian plans on offering templates, as well as resources for onboarding purposes. 

Forge is in closed beta for now, which means companies interested in the programme will have to join a waitlist before they can take the platform for a spin and influence the next steps.