Goal
Understand the platform model before you start reading deployment or operations guides.Prerequisites
- A basic understanding of Docker images, Docker Compose, and Linux hosts
Workflow
How to think about the product
StackShift is not a generic cloud account wrapper and it is not just a Docker UI. It is a platform control plane that coordinates deployments, health, routing, and recovery across machines you connect to it. The product is structured around the workload shape you are trying to run. That distinction matters because different surfaces carry different lifecycle, observability, and recovery behavior.Primary product surfaces
- Projects: application-style deployments from GitHub or Docker images.
- Stacks: multi-container and service-style workloads defined with Compose.
- Templates: curated, versioned blueprints that deploy as stacks.
- Nodes: machines running the agent and hosting workloads.
- Databases: managed database resources tracked separately from stacks.
- Operations: health, alerts, services, node state, and recovery visibility.
Additional product areas
Domains and email, team collaboration, billing, notifications, global settings, and AI diagnosis all exist as first-class product areas in the current platform.Expected result
You can explain the difference between the control plane, nodes, projects, stacks, templates, databases, and operations.
Related guides
Core concepts
A glossary and mental model for projects, stacks, templates, nodes, databases, deployments, and operations.
How StackShift works
A product-level walkthrough of how the control plane, worker, agent, and runtime hosts cooperate.
Current platform status and terminology
A maturity guide for reading the platform docs without collapsing every user-visible surface into the same confidence level.