Core concepts

Five words do most of the work in CloudPilot. Getting them straight now saves a lot of confusion later.

Organisation#

Your workspace. It owns the servers, the projects, the team and the billing.

Everything you do happens inside one organisation. Permissions are per organisation, so being an Owner in one says nothing about another. An account can belong to several and switch between them.

If you signed up on your own, you already have one — it was created with your account.

Server#

A machine you own, with the agent installed on it. CloudPilot does not rent you servers; it manages the ones you already have.

A server belongs to exactly one organisation and can host many projects.

Project#

One deployable thing on one server — a site, an API, a worker.

A project has a runtime (how it should be run) and an environment label (production, staging, preview). It is the unit you deploy, roll back, protect and delete.

Release#

One deployed version of a project, in its own directory on the server.

Deploying creates a new release and points the live path at it. The previous release stays on disk, which is the whole reason rollback is a click instead of a rebuild.

Agent#

The small binary on each server that carries out what the panel asks. It dials out to CloudPilot rather than listening for connections, so you do not open a port for it.

If the agent stops, your sites keep serving — it is not in the request path. You just lose panel control of that machine until it comes back.

How they fit together#

Organisation
├── Team members       (each with a role, optionally scoped to servers)
├── Billing            (plan, which sets your server limit)
└── Servers
    ├── Agent          (one per server)
    ├── Domains        (point at projects)
    ├── Databases
    ├── Firewall rules
    └── Projects
        └── Releases   (the current one is live; older ones enable rollback)

Two distinctions worth getting right#

A server is not a project. Deleting a project does not touch the server. Removing a server from the panel does not wipe the machine. They fail independently and are managed separately.

A role is not a scope. The role says what someone can do; server scope says where. A Developer scoped to staging can deploy — but only to staging.

Next#

• Creating your account
• Quickstart — put all of this into practice