Key concepts
The words Provisioning uses, and what they mean
These definitions are not written on this page. They are generated from the same term list the platform's documentation declares, and the tooltips across this site read the same list: a definition changes in one place and changes everywhere.
- ADR
- ArtifactArchitecture Decision Record: a decision about the platform, written down with the alternatives it rejected and the constraints it leaves in force.
- catalog
- Conceptthe library of building blocks the platform composes into infrastructure: providers and components, each carrying a manifest validated against one shared contract, distributed as a content-addressed OCI artifact.Related: provider, component
- Cedar
- Artifactan open-source policy language; the Control Center evaluates every authorization against Cedar policies.Related: Control Center
- commit
- Artifacta recorded change in Git; every declaration, schema and workflow lives in Git, so every change to infrastructure is one that can be reviewed and reverted.
- component
- Concepta deployable building block from the catalog, such as containerd, etcd, Kubernetes or Cilium; it installs through one installer interface, and the workspace's graph decides its order.Related: catalog, taskservs
- Control Center
- Artifactthe only place an authorization is decided, under Cedar policies.Related: Cedar
- DAG
- Conceptdirected acyclic graph: the dependencies of a workspace, which the orchestrator executes in the order the graph declares and in parallel where it allows.Related: orchestrator, workspace
- MCP
- ArtifactModel Context Protocol: the interface through which an AI agent calls the platform's operations.
- NATS JetStream
- Artifactthe single message broker between services; operations report back on it as events.
- NCL
- ArtifactNickel source (.ncl files): the declarations are the source of truth, and TOML or YAML is only generated from them.Related: Nickel
- Nickel
- Artifactthe typed configuration language every piece of infrastructure is declared in; a declaration is validated against its schema before anything reaches runtime.Related: NCL
- Nushell
- Artifacta shell that pipes structured data instead of text; the provisioning CLI and its workflows are written in it.
- orchestrator
- Artifactthe Rust service that executes a workspace's graph; the only one that calls provider APIs and opens SSH to nodes.Related: DAG, provider
- provider
- Conceptthe pluggable implementation of a cloud or platform behind a fixed contract: a new cloud is a new provider, not a change to the platform.Related: catalog
- runtime
- Conceptwhen the system is already running against real infrastructure, as opposed to when it is declared and checked.
- schema
- Conceptthe typed shape a declaration must have: which fields, of which types, under which constraints; a declaration that does not fit is rejected before anything runs.Related: Nickel
- SurrealDB
- Artifactthe database where the platform services keep their state.
- taskservs
- Conceptthe former name of components: deployment units such as containerd, etcd, Kubernetes or Cilium.Related: component
- vault
- Artifactthe service secrets come through; no other service holds them.
- workspace
- Conceptone typed declaration of servers, components and clusters, composed as a dependency graph and validated end to end.Related: DAG