Version: Weekly Build
Glossary
Definitions for the product terms used across the Codesphere documentation, organized alphabetically by letter. Each entry names the product area it belongs to and links to the page where the concept is explained in full. This glossary also cross-references docs/Private_Cloud/glossary.mdx — terms that are purely installer/admin-internal (Jumpbox, SOPS, Age key, and similar) stay exclusive to that page, but a handful of general product concepts that happen to only be documented there (like OMS and Data Center) are included here too.
A
| Term | Category | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| A/B Test (Traffic Split) | Domains & Networking | Attaching two Landscapes to one domain so Codesphere's load balancer splits traffic between them, pinning each visitor to one side for their session via a sticky-session cookie. See Setting Up A/B Tests. |
| Always On | Deployment | The availability mode that keeps a service running continuously instead of scaling to zero when idle — the documented requirement for production domains, since an Off-When-Unused service incurs a cold start on its next request. See Configuring a Landscape. |
| API Key | Account | A personal access token generated in User Settings that grants API and CLI callers the same permissions as the issuing user account. See API Keys. |
B
| Term | Category | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Backup Store | Managed Services | The external S3-compatible destination — your own bucket or a Codesphere Object Storage managed service — that a managed service's backups are written to; its capacity and redundancy are your responsibility. See Managed Service Backups. |
| Base Image | Runtimes | The container image a Reactive or Managed Container starts from — a shared, Codesphere-maintained default, or a custom image you specify per service, per preview deployment, or platform-wide. See Runtimes. |
| Blue/Green (Zero-Downtime) Release | Deployment | A release strategy that builds and verifies a new Workspace before flipping domain routing to it via the Public API, avoiding any window where the application is unreachable. See Automating Tasks with the API. |
C
| Term | Category | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| CI/CD | Deployment | Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment — building, testing, and deploying a Landscape automatically from its ci.yml pipeline on every sync. See Configuring CI Pipelines. |
| CI Profile | Deployment | A named variant of the ci.yml configuration (for example ci.dev.yml, ci.prod.yml) used to customize build and run behavior per environment. See Using CI Profiles. |
ci.yml | Deployment | The infrastructure-as-code file that declaratively defines a Landscape's prepare and run stages, services, resources, and networking. See Configuring CI Pipelines. |
| Cloud IDE | Development | Codesphere's browser-based, real-time collaborative development environment connected to a Landscape's shared filesystem, including a shared terminal session visible to every Workspace member. See Cloud IDE. |
| Cluster Admin | Platform Administration | The instance-wide administrator role required to publish globally-available Managed Service Providers and manage organizations across a whole Codesphere installation. See Organizations API. |
| Codesphere Agent | Runtimes | The platform process injected into every runtime to provide orchestration and monitoring; in a Managed Container it runs as PID 1, so your image's own process runs as its child instead. See Managed Containers. |
Codesphere CLI (cs) | APIs & Automations | The open-source command-line tool, pre-installed in every Workspace, for managing and debugging Codesphere resources from the terminal. See Getting Started with the CLI. |
| Codesphere-Managed vs. Ecosystem Service | Managed Services | Whether Codesphere owns the provider, backend, and infrastructure for a Managed Service end-to-end, or you own one or more of those layers yourself as a self-managed or partner-provided service. See Managed Services Overview. |
| Codesphere Reactive | Runtimes | A "stateful serverless" runtime built on a shared, Codesphere-maintained base image with persistent storage, millisecond cold starts, and automatic scale-to-zero when idle. See Codesphere Reactives. |
| Cold Start | Runtimes | The startup delay incurred when a scaled-to-zero (Off-When-Unused) service wakes on its next request; Codesphere Reactives minimize this with a pre-warmed, shared base image. See Runtimes. |
| Custom Domain | Domains & Networking | A user-owned domain connected to a Team and routed to one or more Workspaces after DNS (Domain Name System) verification, with automatic TLS (Transport Layer Security). See Connecting Custom Domains. |
| Custom REST Backend | Managed Services | A backend implemented against Codesphere's REST (Representational State Transfer) Adapter API contract, used to bring any external system into the Managed Services catalog. See Custom REST Backends. |
D
| Term | Category | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Data Center | Platform Administration | The ID identifying a specific Codesphere installation or region — not a physical building — that a Team is pinned to; it appears in dev domain hostnames and SSH jump addresses. See Private Cloud Glossary. |
| Dev Domain | Domains & Networking | The auto-generated URL (<workspace-id>.<data-center>.<instance-domain>) assigned to every Workspace by default. See Restricting Domain Access. |
| DSN (Data Source Name) | Managed Services | The connection string a Managed Service Provider returns after provisioning, giving an application everything it needs to connect to the service. See Managed Services Overview. |
E
| Term | Category | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Environment Variable | Deployment | A key-value configuration entry injected into a service at runtime, managed via the UI, bulk .env upload, or ci.yml templating. See Environment Variables. |
| Execution Manager | Deployment | The Workspace panel used to sync a Landscape, run its Prepare and Run stages, start, stop, or restart services, switch CI Profiles, and tear down — the primary deployment control surface. See Landscape Lifecycle. |
F
| Term | Category | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Feature Flag | Platform Administration | A per-installation toggle — stable, opt-in preview, or Codesphere-internal — that gates whether a platform capability is visible at all. See Feature Flags. |
G
| Term | Category | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Git Panel | Development | The Cloud IDE sidebar panel for staging, committing, and pushing changes, with Fetch/Pull/Push controls. See Git Integration. |
| Git Permissions | Account | The user-level connections to Git providers (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket) that authorize Codesphere to create Workspaces and preview deployments from a repository. See Git Permissions. |
H
| Term | Category | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Headless Service | Deployment | A ci.yml entry that adds an HTTP routing rule to the Landscape Router pointing at an existing endpoint (for example inside a Virtual Cluster) without deploying a new Reactive. See Headless Services. |
| Health Endpoint | Deployment | The URL, checked from inside the container, that the Landscape Router probes to decide whether a service instance is healthy and ready to receive traffic. See Configuring a Landscape. |
| Hosting Plan | Platform Administration | The raw CPU, memory, and storage allocation a cluster administrator defines; one or more Workspace Plans reference a Hosting Plan to determine what resources a user-selected plan actually provides. See Workspace and Hosting Plans. |
I
| Term | Category | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| IaC (Infrastructure as Code) | Core Concepts | Defining a Landscape's runtimes, managed services, networking, and routing entirely in the version-controlled ci.yml file, so the same deployment can be reproduced across environments. See Platform Architecture. |
| IDE Pod | Development | The compute a Workspace's cockpit — terminal, Cloud IDE, VS Code Server, Prepare stage — runs on, kept separate from the compute powering the Landscape's own services. See Landscapes & Workspaces. |
| Infrastructure Layer | Core Concepts | Codesphere's internal foundation — Kubernetes for compute, Ceph for storage, and networking — managed via the Codesphere OMS; not a customer-facing "infrastructure as a service" offering, but what the Platform Layer runs on. See Platform Architecture. |
Install Config (config.yaml) | Platform Administration | The installation-wide configuration file describing a Codesphere instance's infrastructure, networking, storage, plans, and enabled features. See Private Cloud Installer Config Reference. |
| Internal URL | Domains & Networking | The private, in-cluster address (http://ws-server-<workspace-id>-<service>.workspaces:<port>) Landscape services use to reach each other directly, without going through the public Landscape Router. See Restricting Domain Access. |
L
| Term | Category | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Landscape | Core Concepts | A deployment configuration for an application and its architecture, declared in a single ci.yml file and instantiated as a running set of services. See Landscapes & Workspaces. |
| Landscape-based Provider | Managed Services | A Managed Service Provider implemented as a Codesphere Landscape, letting any deployed application be published as a reusable, one-click service. See Creating Service Providers. |
| Landscape Config Editor | Deployment | The UI, opened from a Workspace's Deploy sidebar icon, used to configure a Landscape's services, resources, networking, and environment variables as an alternative to editing ci.yml by hand. See Configuring a Landscape. |
| Landscape Health Monitoring | Monitoring | Real-time and historical CPU, memory, and storage visibility per service, reached from the workspace table shortcut or the Workspace's Resources button. See Monitoring Landscape Health. |
| Landscape Lifecycle | Deployment | The full sequence a Landscape goes through — creation, sync, running, teardown, and deletion — with different data-persistence guarantees at each stage. See Landscape Lifecycle. |
| Landscape Router (Workspace Router) | Core Concepts | The routing layer that maps incoming HTTP requests to a Landscape's services by configured path prefix and load-balances across replicas. See Landscapes & Workspaces. |
| Local IDE Integration | Development | Connecting a local editor to a Workspace via Git sync, the Codesphere VS Code extension's Microsoft-tunnel connection, or direct SSH for any SSH-capable IDE (JetBrains, Vim, Emacs). See Connecting Local IDE. |
| Log Browser | Monitoring | An observability tool that unifies application service logs and pipeline execution logs for a Landscape, based on OpenTelemetry collection. See Log Browser. |
M
| Term | Category | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Managed Container | Runtimes | A runtime for a custom OCI (Open Container Initiative)/Docker image where Codesphere manages orchestration, scaling, networking, and monitoring around it via the same Codesphere Agent every runtime uses, while you own and supply the image itself. See Managed Containers. |
| Managed Service | Managed Services | A catalog-provisioned dependency — database, cache, storage, message queue, or Virtual Cluster — that Codesphere provisions and lifecycle-manages, connected to a Landscape over the private network. See Managed Services Overview. |
| Managed Service Backup | Managed Services | Automated, scheduled snapshots of a supported managed service stored in an S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service)-compatible backup store, usable for point-in-time recovery. See Managed Service Backups. |
| MB vs. MiB | Managed Services | A documented inconsistency across Managed Services docs and schemas — some storage sizes are specified in decimal megabytes (MB), others in binary mebibytes (MiB) — worth checking case by case rather than assuming. See Custom REST Backends. |
| Monitoring (Observability Stack) | Monitoring | Codesphere's optional, OpenTelemetry-based platform for logs, traces, and resource metrics, enabled per Team and then per Landscape. See Enabling Monitoring. |
| Monitoring Plan | Monitoring | The separately-activated, sized observability tier a Resource Group admin enables before the Log Browser and Request Browser start collecting data. See Enabling Monitoring. |
N
| Term | Category | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Network File System | Core Concepts | The shared, persistent filesystem mounted at /home/user/app across a Workspace and its Landscape's Reactive services, surviving restarts and scaling. See Landscapes & Workspaces. |
| Nix (Package Manager) | Deployment | The declarative, rootless package manager Codesphere uses for installing binary dependencies in the Prepare stage, since Reactives run without root access; packages land in a Nix store shared across the Landscape's Reactive services. See Installing Dependencies with Nix. |
O
| Term | Category | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Off-When-Unused | Deployment | A per-service mode where the runtime scales to zero after a period of inactivity and restarts automatically on the next request. See Landscape Lifecycle. |
| OIDC (OpenID Connect) | Platform Administration | An identity standard Codesphere Private Cloud installations can use to authenticate users against an external identity provider, configured separately from Git provider integrations. See Identity Providers. |
| OMS (Operations Management System) | Platform Administration | Codesphere's administrator CLI for downloading installer packages, generating install configuration, and installing and operating a Private Cloud instance's underlying infrastructure. See Private Cloud Glossary. |
| OpenBao | Deployment | The open-source secrets engine underlying Codesphere's Secret / Vault feature, storing values encrypted at rest and releasing them to services only by reference. See Secret Management. |
| OpenVSIX | Development | The open-source extension marketplace the integrated VS Code Server uses instead of the official Microsoft Marketplace — the reason some Microsoft extensions need manual installation. See VS Code Server. |
| Organization | Core Concepts | The top-level administrative entity representing a company, providing centralized governance and access control over all of its Teams. See Organizations & Teams. |
P
| Term | Category | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) | Core Concepts | The category of product Codesphere is as a whole — a self-hostable cloud platform providing development, deployment, and operations tooling throughout the software lifecycle. See Introduction to Codesphere. |
| Path-Based Routing | Domains & Networking | Directing traffic to different services or Workspaces based on URL path prefixes on the same domain. See Path-Based Routing. |
| Platform Layer | Core Concepts | The application and lifecycle-management layer built on top of the Infrastructure Layer, providing runtimes, managed services, CI/CD, observability, and multi-tenancy — together, the two layers make up Codesphere's PaaS offering. See Platform Architecture. |
| Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) | Managed Services | Restoring a managed service to an arbitrary moment between scheduled backups rather than to one discrete snapshot; a recovery always creates a new service instance rather than restoring in place. See Managed Service Backups. |
| Prepare Stage | Deployment | The optional ci.yml phase — labeled Application Setup in the Landscape Config Editor — that installs dependencies and builds the application on the shared filesystem before services run. See Configuring CI Pipelines. |
| Preview Comments | Domains & Networking | Figma-style contextual commenting available on Preview Deployments, letting reviewers leave frontend feedback directly on the running application. See GitHub Preview Deployments. |
| Preview Deployment | Domains & Networking | A temporary, isolated Landscape automatically created for a pull or merge request, sharing production's architecture for QA before merge. See GitHub Preview Deployments. |
| Provider Backend | Managed Services | The component that connects a Service Provider to its underlying compute and executes create, update, delete, and status operations for a service. See Managed Services Overview. |
| Provider Capabilities | Managed Services | The declared set of lifecycle features a Managed Service Provider's backend actually implements — pause, backups, point-in-time recovery, high availability — shown to users as capability indicators. See Creating Service Providers. |
| Provider Maturity Label (GA / Preview / Closed Testing) | Managed Services | The status shown on every Managed Service Provider page — General Availability, an opt-in Preview feature not enabled by default, or Closed Testing available only on dedicated installations. See Creating Service Providers. |
| Provider Scope | Managed Services | Whether a Managed Service Provider is available to every Team on the installation (global) or restricted to an explicit list of Teams. See Creating Service Providers. |
| Public API | APIs & Automations | Codesphere's REST API for programmatically managing Workspaces, pipelines, domains, and managed services, authenticated via a Bearer API token. See Public API. |
| Public Port URL | Domains & Networking | Exposing a service's port directly as its own subdomain instead of routing it through the Landscape Router — documented as less secure and intended only for legacy frameworks that can't be reverse-proxied. See Runtimes. |
R
| Term | Category | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) | Platform Administration | The resource-isolation and policy-enforcement model underlying Codesphere's multi-tenancy, restricting what a user can see and do based on their assigned role. See Platform Architecture. |
| Reconciler | Managed Services | The control loop that continuously polls a Managed Service Provider's backend and drives the actual service infrastructure toward the desired state Codesphere has stored for it. See Managed Services Overview. |
| Replicas | Deployment | The number of horizontally-scaled instances of a service, load-balanced automatically by the Landscape Router. See Configuring a Landscape. |
| Request Browser | Monitoring | A monitoring tool that records latency, HTTP status codes, and traces for every external request to a Landscape's public endpoints. See Request Browser. |
| Resource Audit Log | Platform Administration | The per-resource history of lifecycle events — creation, start/stop, sizing changes — with user attribution, used to track who changed what and when. See Usage & Cost Control. |
| Resource Plan | Deployment | The resource tier (vCPU, memory, storage) a service is assigned via the plan field in ci.yml — in the UI, this selects a Workspace Plan, which in turn maps to an administrator-defined Hosting Plan. See Configuring a Landscape. |
| Restricted (Private) Domain | Domains & Networking | A domain-access mode requiring visitors to authenticate as a Team member, or via API key, before reaching the application. See Restricting Domain Access. |
| Rootless Container | Runtimes | Codesphere Reactives run without root access — no privileged ports, no root-level package installs — which is why dependency installation goes through Nix instead of apt/sudo. See Runtimes. |
| Run Stage | Deployment | The ci.yml section — labeled Landscape Deployment in the Landscape Config Editor — that defines a Landscape's deployed services, their compute resources, and runtime configuration (ports, health checks, environment variables). See Configuring CI Pipelines. |
| Runtime | Runtimes | The execution environment type — Reactive, Managed Container, Virtual Cluster, Virtual Machine, or Managed Service — that a Landscape service runs on. See Runtimes. |
S
| Term | Category | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Secret / Vault | Deployment | Sensitive values stored in Codesphere's OpenBao-backed vault and injected into services at runtime via ${{ vault.NAME }} templating, never stored in Git — distinct from a Private Cloud installation's own encrypted prod.vault.yaml. See Secret Management. |
| Self-Healing | Deployment | Platform monitoring that automatically restarts a service process if it crashes or exits unexpectedly. See Configuring CI Pipelines. |
| Service Account (Technical User) | Account | A dedicated, non-personal account recommended for CI automation and for owning long-lived Landscape-based Providers, so automated workflows keep working if the person who set them up leaves. See GitHub Preview Deployments. |
| Service Catalog | Managed Services | The browsable set of Managed Service Providers available to a Team, shown as provider cards in the Managed Services UI. See Managed Services Overview. |
| Service Provider | Managed Services | A reproducible blueprint — Codesphere-managed, Landscape-based, or REST-based — defining what a Managed Service is and how it is configured. See Creating Service Providers. |
| Shared Vault | Deployment | A Team-level vault partition that multiple Workspaces can reference for centrally-rotated secrets; a Workspace resolves ${{ vault.NAME }} against either its own vault or its assigned Shared Vault, never both at once. See Secret Management. |
| Soft Delete / Force Delete | Managed Services | Deleting a Managed Service normally waits for a final backup before removing it, staying recoverable during a retention window; Force Delete skips that wait and is an explicit, irreversible data-loss operation. See Deploying Services. |
| SSH Access | Development | Direct terminal access to a Workspace over SSH (Secure Shell), authenticated with a public key registered in User Settings or via the Public API. See Connect to Workspace via SSH. |
| Standalone Managed Service | Managed Services | A Managed Service created via the UI or API that persists independently of any Landscape — as opposed to one declared in ci.yml, which is created and deleted along with its Landscape. See Deploying Services. |
| Standalone Team | Platform Administration | A Team that isn't attached to any Organization; migrating one into an Organization requires every member to already be an Organization member. See Migrating a Standalone Team. |
| Strip Path | Domains & Networking | A Landscape Router option that removes the matched public path prefix before forwarding a request to the upstream service. See Headless Services. |
| Sync | Deployment | The action of applying a Landscape's ci.yml configuration to provision or update its actual running resources. See Landscape Lifecycle. |
T
| Term | Category | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Team Container Registry | Runtimes | Team-level container registry credentials, configured once and matched automatically against a Managed Container's base image at deploy time. See Managed Containers. |
| Team (Resource Group) | Core Concepts | A collection of resources — Workspaces, Landscapes, Managed Services — and the access controls around them, nested under an Organization. See Organizations & Teams. |
| Team Role (Owner / Admin / Member) | Account | The hierarchy governing access within an Organization and its Teams — Organization Owners get implicit Admin rights on every Team, and users must join the Organization before joining any of its Teams. See Organizations & Teams. |
| Team Singleton (Provider) | Managed Services | A provider setting that limits a Team to at most one non-deleted managed service instance per provider version. See Creating Service Providers. |
| Teardown | Deployment | Deprovisioning a Landscape's compute resources while preserving its persistent volumes, so it can be resynced later without data loss. See Landscape Lifecycle. |
| Test Stage | Deployment | A ci.yml stage still present in the pipeline schema and API but removed from the pipeline UI — testing commands now belong in the Prepare (Application Setup) stage instead. See Configuring CI Pipelines. |
| TLS Certificate Mode | Domains & Networking | Whether Codesphere automatically issues and renews a domain's TLS certificate, or the certificate is self-managed, transferring renewal responsibility to you. See Connecting Custom Domains. |
U
| Term | Category | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Usage Summary | Platform Administration | The per-Resource-Group admin view of current and historical resource consumption and cost, filterable by time range and resource type. See Usage & Cost Control. |
V
| Term | Category | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Virtual Cluster (Cloud Native Deployment) | Runtimes | An isolated, managed Kubernetes environment with full kubectl/Helm access, provisioned per Team as a Managed Service. See Virtual Clusters. |
| Virtual Machine (VM) | Runtimes | An early-access runtime that spins up KubeVirt-based virtual machines for legacy applications, OS-level requirements, or Windows workloads alongside Reactives and Managed Containers. See Runtimes. |
| Volume Mount | Deployment | Restricting a service to a subdirectory of the shared filesystem, or mounting a specific workspace path into a container at an arbitrary location — used to isolate file access between services. See Runtimes. |
| VPN (Host-to-Site) | Domains & Networking | A Virtual Private Network tunnel, using IPsec, where each Workspace service replica independently connects as a client to a private-network gateway, rather than a traditional site-to-site VPN. See Private Network (VPN). |
| VS Code Server | Development | An integrated, full-featured VS Code server running in the Workspace on the same shared filesystem, offered as an alternative to the Cloud IDE. See VS Code Server. |
W
| Term | Category | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Workspace | Core Concepts | The dedicated cockpit — IDE, CI tooling, monitoring — for interacting with the Landscape instance attached to it; runs on its own compute and spins down automatically when idle. See Landscapes & Workspaces. |
| Workspace Plan | Deployment | The user-selectable plan (Micro, Boost, Pro, or others an admin defines) chosen via the plan field in ci.yml, mapping to an underlying Hosting Plan and setting replica and on-demand behavior. See Workspace and Hosting Plans. |
| Workspace Toolkit | Core Concepts | The integrated set of tools inside a Workspace, presented as a flat list of sidebar icons and organized in this documentation into three categories — Development, Deployment, and Monitoring — used to build, deploy, and observe a Landscape. See Landscapes & Workspaces. |