Goal
Give new users enough vocabulary to understand the rest of the docs.Prerequisites
- Read “What is StackShift” first
Workflow
1
Learn the difference between project deployments and stack deployments.
2
Use applications to model private relationships between projects and databases.
3
Treat templates as stack blueprints, not as a separate runtime engine.
4
Treat nodes as schedulable runtime hosts, not as dashboard-only records.
5
Treat operations as the cross-resource health and recovery surface.
Objects you manage
- Project: an app deployment unit, usually GitHub- or image-based.
- Application: a private service graph made from projects, databases, and explicit bindings.
- Stack: a Compose-defined service unit, often stateful or service-oriented.
- Template: a versioned blueprint that renders into a stack.
- Node: a connected machine running the StackShift agent.
- Compute instance: a billed virtual machine with provisioning, lifecycle, backup, rescue, console, and firewall controls when enabled.
- Database: a managed database resource with its own lifecycle and recovery behavior.
Operational language
- Placement: where a workload is scheduled.
- Maintenance: a node state used before upgrades or disruptive host actions.
- Recovery state: the current retry / cleanup / manual-attention state for an operation.
- Template provenance: the recorded template version and inputs used to deploy a stack.
- Durable operation: a long-running task whose persisted state and events remain authoritative after the original request ends.
- Approval: authorization bound to the actor, tenant, action arguments, target version, and expiry.
Expected result
Terms used across the dashboard and docs feel consistent instead of ambiguous.
Related guides
What is StackShift
StackShift is a cloud application and infrastructure platform for deploying software, operating data and compute, and investigating production systems.
How StackShift works
A product-level walkthrough of how the control plane, worker, agent, and runtime hosts cooperate.