Glossary

Below a list of some specific terms related to the DeltaBlue.Cloud platform.

Project

A project is the top level organizational object within the DeltaBlue.Cloud platform. Before you can do anything else, you should create a project first.

Environment

By default you will start your project with only one environment "production". Consider an environment as a specific configuration store of environment variables. Environments allow you to reuse applications/stacks with different configuration values/parameters. Each set of configured environment variables relates to one specific stack item. Multiple Stack Items related to the same stack item will share the same specific environment variables.

Application

Each application in your project will be build up out of one or more stack items. You could see the term application more as a global application role, a meaningful collection of stack items. Often we use the term/alias "stack" for the concept application.

Stack

The term stack is merely an alias for the concept "application". A stack can consists out of one or more stack items.

Stack item

A stack item is the lowest level organizational object and important in terms of provisioning. From provisioning perspective, each stack item is linked to the container base image being used for the Stack Item deploy. Because of this strict relation, each chosen stack item will have its own Stack Item. Note that is is also possible to distribute the load of a single stack item over multiple Stack Items. Depending on the complexity of your environment, you can either have one or more Stack Items running for your application or stack item.

Component

The goal of the concept component is to make a stack item reusable. For certain software, it may happen that there is no appropriate stack item available for you. You can than spawn a generic image, install and configure the appropriate software and create a custom component. From that moment on your custom component can be used as reusable stack item in your current and new projects.

Component Matrix

The component matrix defines which components (= stack items) can be used in combination with each other. Although the component matrix is not visible in the web interface, it will guide you to select compatible component/stack items for your application/stack. More specifically, the matrix defines which components can communicate with each other. In theory, you could combine any number of components in an application, however the matrix defines which components will be made accessible on the network from other Stack Items.

Scenario

A scenario is a deployment template that allows you to automate a number repeatable tasks on your Stack Items. Scenarios can be executed on a single or a collection of Stack Items. A scenario consists out of one or more tasks.

Task

Before you can use your new scenario, you need to build it up from a number of tasks (= actions). The platform allows you to select from a default set of actions or you can create you own custom actions. A custom action can be written in almost any interpreted language (as long it is installed on your Stack Item). However the most common used choice is bash.

Blueprint

A blueprint is a project template that allows you to automatically rebuild new projects based on the configuration of an existing project. Blueprints allow you to quickly spawn complex projects with a lot of applications and Stack Items involved. You can extract a usable blueprint from your first project once you finished configuring it. Blueprints are especially beneficial when you have a lot of similar projects.

Edge Gateway

Edge Gateway = Firewall / Loadbalancer / SSL Offloading (HTTPS)

By default one Edge Gateway is being assigned per environment. The Edge Gateway is the public endpoint for all the applications spawn within your environment. The Edge Gateway is an enhanced reverse proxy which provides:

  • extra security (application containers are not directly accessible on the internet)
  • better performance through HTTP caching
  • easy horizontal scale-out (both Edge Gateways and Stack Items)
  • SSL offloading

Important There is no Edge Gateway Limit per environment, we can spawn multiple Edge Gateways on customer's request. However this is currently still a manual action.