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Nova

Nova is your AI platform engineer. It works across your stack the way a platform engineer does: it deploys and configures, investigates incidents, and operates production day to day. Unlike a read-only chat assistant, Nova can also act, and those actions run under guardrails you control: scoped permissions, approvals on sensitive changes, a full audit trail, and rollback.

Nova runs on the Nova orchestrator engine and is one of two AstroPulse products. Nova is the AI platform engineer; Astro Platform is the governed runtime it goes deepest on. See the platform overview for how they fit together, or the Nova product page for the bigger picture.

This page is a practical guide to what Nova does and how to use it.

What Nova does​

Nova follows the same operator model on every task: investigate, plan, approve, execute, observe. It applies that model across three verticals.

Deploy​

Ship applications and infrastructure to production.

"Deploy the payments service to the staging cluster from the main branch."

"Generate a Terraform module for an EKS cluster, then plan it."

Investigate (AI SRE)​

Incident response is one vertical Nova does especially well. It investigates like an SRE, then goes further and acts on the finding. Nova forms hypotheses, collects evidence, identifies the root cause, proposes a remediation, and drafts the postmortem.

"Why is the checkout service returning 5xx errors?"

"Investigate the latency spike on the payments cluster and propose a fix."

"Draft a postmortem for last night's outage: timeline, impact, and follow-ups."

Operate​

Run day-2 operations safely: remediation, upgrades, rollbacks, scaling, and configuration.

"Roll back the last deploy on the api cluster."

"Upgrade the dev cluster to Kubernetes 1.30 and watch the rollout."

These write workflows run under the guardrails noted above, enforced by Astro Platform, the runtime Nova goes deepest on.

One AI, Any Interface​

Nova meets you where you work. The same AI, the same skills, the same context, across every interface:

InterfaceBest ForGet Started
Nova CloudTeams, dashboards, sharingOpen Nova →
Nova CLIOperators, incident response, shell workflowsastroctl nova
SlackTeam collaboration, alerts, async workflowsEnable the Slack skill

Start a conversation in the browser, continue it from your terminal, get notified in Slack. Your sessions and context carry across.

Skill-Based Architecture​

Nova does not hardcode integrations. It uses skills: each skill is a self-contained integration that gives Nova new capabilities.

  • Astro Platform: the deepest skill. Clusters, applications, rollouts, cost, audit, and governed execution. This is the runtime Nova acts through in production.
  • GitHub: search code, view issues, explore repositories.
  • Slack: send messages, search channels, respond to @mentions.
  • Cloud Cost Calculator: estimate costs across AWS, GCP, and Azure.
  • Infrastructure Tools: generate Terraform, Helm, and Kubernetes configs.

Skills are extensible. We ship new ones regularly, and Nova Direct supports custom skills via the MCP Marketplace. See Skills for the full list.

Try Nova​

Start immediately at Open Nova →. No setup required.

Nova CLI​

Use Nova directly from your shell with astroctl nova.

curl -fsSL https://astropulse.io/install.sh | bash
astroctl nova

See Nova Terminal for chat commands, keyboard shortcuts, and session resume flows.

Nova Direct​

Run on your own infrastructure with full data sovereignty. Setup guide →

Learn More​