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Core concepts

These are the fundamentals of Attlaz. Understanding them makes the rest of the documentation easier to follow. For short definitions, see Key Terms.

Organising your work​

Workspaces, projects and environments structure everything you build.

  • A workspace is your organisation on Attlaz. It holds your team members and your projects.
  • A project is a single integration or automation effort. A project has one or more environments — typically development, staging and production — so you can build and test changes before they go live.

Flows​

A flow is an automated workflow: a plan of one or more steps that Attlaz executes. A flow is started by a trigger (an API call, a webhook, a schedule, or an incoming email), can branch on logic, performs actions, and can send reports such as an email or a Slack message.

Each execution of a flow is a flow run. A flow run moves through a lifecycle — Pending → Running → Complete / Failed / Stopped / Canceled. See Flows for the full model.

Runners​

Flows execute on runners — the processes that pick up flow runs and run their code. Runners are organised into runner pools: each environment has a default pool, and you can add more pools to control concurrency and scale independently. A flow uses its assigned pool, or the environment's default pool if none is set.

Adapters and connections​

Attlaz connects to the outside world through adapters.

  • An external service is a third party such as Magento, Google, or Slack.
  • An adapter is the Attlaz component that knows how to talk to that service.
  • An adapter connection is your configured instance of an adapter, holding the credentials for one account.
  • For services that use OAuth, Attlaz stores and automatically refreshes the provider token behind the connection, so your integrations keep working without you re-authenticating.

Code and deployments​

Your flow logic can live in a code source — a repository (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and others) in any supported language. Attlaz deploys that code and runs it as part of a flow. Ready-made templates let you build common steps without writing code.

Storage​

Flows can read and write data through Attlaz storage, organised into tiers with different lifetimes and guarantees (cache, persistent, vault for secrets, and platform-internal). This lets a flow keep state between runs or pass data between steps.

Catalogs​

The Attlaz product apps — Data Enrichment, Feed Management and Competitor Monitoring — work on a catalog: a named selection of products drawn from an adapter connection. A project can hold several catalogs, and each app operates on the catalog you select. See the product manuals for details.